The upshot of all this is that many sellers sales have tailed off quite considerably and whilst my business is still moving forward I feel the time might be right to renew my friendship with Affiliate Marketing and try to build a couple more income streams. I have a few ideas in mind for new sites and coupled with the fact that I have a little time on my hands I believe it could be a wise move.

Just going back to ultimate Mods for a second, one thing that dawned on me recently was that after my initial enquiries with a couple of Affiliate Networks which dwindled out without ever getting off the ground, is that it may be a good time to try that avenue again, so I thought I would ask you, do you think there is a place in AM for my site? and if so who would you suggest as a good network to contact, having been out of the scene for what seems an age I just want to make sure I contact the correct people who are making waves right now

I will get back to updating the site in the near future and will keep you posted on my progress with Aff marketing, please feel free to contact me or leave messages to this post

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.

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

On another note: I’ve managed to do some coding on my Keyword Organiser program that has seen the addition of a new feature where the URL can be set within Google, I just need to do a little more testing and I will release it: Hopefully by the weekend!

Fitness: Ahhh all this sitting in front of the computer has seen me put on a few pounds, I’ve been taking my daughter to Ju Jitsu for the last few weeks and fancied doing it again myself (I did it about 8 years ago until I got quite badly injured). So I attended the adult classes last Thursday, it was obvious to them that I had done it before, so we skipped most of the basic training and went straight into throws, wrist locks and some of the more complicated break falls, well today is the first time I have been able to move without being in pain lol, but I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it and will be attending again this week!

I’m tired, exhausted infact and it’s reasonably late so I’m going to bed: Drop back soon!

Mark.

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

1. To be making £1500 a month from my online activites by May 07: NET
Surprisingly this one is looking very good already, I started a new business venture with Steve (Carmod - from the competition I talked about in an earlier post, we have become very good friends and now business partners) and things are looking very promising for the future. This is not an Affiliate Marketing business but a full blown retail business, we already hold stock and have turned over nearly £500 in our first week, so I strongly believe that #1 will be easily accomplished.

2. To be up and running with my finance site by mid February
This one is definately not going to be achieved, unfortunately with so much work and such long hours going into making the new business a success I have had to put this goal on the backburner for at least 2 months. I still seriously believe I will get into this lucrative sector, it’s just that I need some positive cash flow now. My mlm business venture is getting a little tiresome and to be honest after 2 years of putting out catalogues I’m at the end of my tether with regards to making it work (it’s still an amazing earner for the hours I do though).

3. To finish Mad4Sport and make it a true price comparison site rather than a site which simply has several of the same products but no true comparison of them.
Hmm unfortunately this is another goal that has had to be put on the backburner, one of the biggest problems I feel with the sector is most of the bigger merchants have phone numbers plastered all over their site making far too many leakage points, so I am hesitant to put too many hours into this one at the moment as it would be at the sacrifice of making some real money in the new venture. On a positive note: Umbro sent me (through Sport-e) 2 tickets to the England - Spain game on Wednesday evening which was very nice of them (would have been even nicer if the seats they allocated had been together as they knew I was taking my 6 year old daughter - fortunately we were very lucky and some nice security at Old Trafford helped relocate us), other than nearly getting mugged by some Mancunian Drug Addicts as I mistakenly walked into an unlit car park, the evening was a complete success and thoroughly enjoyable (I’m fairly street wise and I can tell you even with my heart beating so fast it hurt, and as 4 blokes towered over me whilst carrying my daughter on my shoulders, my brain was fully functional, I briskly barged past the biggest one (I always go for the biggest one it puts the rest off guard) walked out into the road and called to some guys getting into a car after the match pretending to ask them a question, this gave us enough time and attention to get the hell out of there and back into the crowds, pretty scary though.

4. To have a site that I am totally happy with!
Hmm strangely this one is probably going to be fulfilled too, the new ecommerce site we have setup for our new business is very nice indeed (we are continually working on it tweaking things and changing the odd bit here and there) and I am very happy with it. Sorry I am not mentioning the new business name or sector, at the moment I want to keep my cards close to my chest to avoid unnecessary competition.

5 and 6:
To start and maintain a resource site, something that until now my portfolio seriously lacks
To live life a bit more, currently I work some days for 18 hours, I must find time to relax a bit more or life might just pass me by
I think theres enough information above to show that neither of these are likely candidates to win Goal achievement of the year awards

7. By the end of 2007 my goal is to be making at least £4000 a month profit
Hmm yes I seriously expect to not only achieve this but now I believe that I will surpass it, by taking what we learn from this new business and using that knowledge in additional ventures I see 2007 as being my most successful year ever.

I also promise to post more through 2007 - No really I do!
Okay this has been a long post, and I really don’t have the time to waffle on anymore, hope you enjoyed the read and I hope to see you here again soon.

Mark.

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.

• To be making £1500 a month from my online activites by May 07: NET
• To be up and running with my finance site by mid February
• To finish Mad4Sport and make it a true price comparison site rather than a site which simply has several of the same products but no true comparison of them.
• To have a site that I am totally happy with!
• To start and maintain a resource site, something that until now my portfolio seriously lacks
• To live life a bit more, currently I work some days for 18 hours, I must find time to relax a bit more or life might just pass me by
• By the end of 2007 my goal is to be making at least £4000 a month profit

Well thats the bulk of it, mostly work or money orientated as one might expect for someone starting out on the road to fame and fortune, but I fully expect to achieve at least 90% of them. The biggest challenge I think is to cram it all in, I have entered myself into a competition regarding affiliate marketing and you can follow the progress of all the competitors here we have agreed to document our progress (successes and failures) throughout the 6 month trial, so hopefully everyone should be able to learn from the experiment. On top of that I have the above goals to work towards, a family to support, another offline business to run and God only gave us 7 days a week and 24 hours a day!

1and1 domains
I have for the last 3 and a half weeks had to phone 1and1 about this domain not propogating properly almost every single day, today however was the last straw and I asked for the complaints department and the procedure to request compensation, OMG not 12 hours later I can suddenly access my domain, now either that is spooky coincidence or they got their finger out and finally did something (I know it takes upto 72 hours to fully propogate but this was purely a problem there end with settings as it was never showing the same DNS settings after a refresh - very strange indeed). So heres my take on this, if you want support that is routed via a country that is hundreds or thousands of miles away, that when you get through cannot help you more than to say “Sorry Sir that is in the hands of our domain department, there is no further information I can give you” - Some support team, and you don’t want to be able to use the domain names you have purchased for say 1/24th of the contract term, then 1and1 are for you! I guess you gets what you pays for.

Have a Fantastic Christmas, a prosperous New Year and lets make some money in 2007! (I will probably post again but this is just incase I cannot access my domain again until January).

Mark.

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

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.