Yesterday I was invited to tinker with affiliatefuture’s new affiliate software - using the affiliate future voucher code webservice to populate a website with discount voucher code and affiliate links. More info and get the software here
It took about 2 minuites to install the basic setup, then I had a functional discount voucher site, nice.
The software is very simple and is really to be used as a platform for affiliates to develop and produce their own affiliate voucher code websites, so although useful from the outset for newbies and those not into php, it is a tool that will find its place with those code savvy enough to modify.
The first changes I made included, URL rewrites to give SE friendly and easy readable urls. Making affiliate sites open in a new window. Some cosmetic changes - but not many I must admit. (It is easy enough to drop a new template onto the site - free templates are available from places like oswd.org)
It is early days yet. I expect the basic script to be vastly improved over the coming weeks, I hopefully will have some time to modify my discount voucher site
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It has come to our attention that a number of affiliates are using just the basic description of PurelyDiamonds taken from either the affiliatewindow page or the Purely Diamonds site itself, this is not a big problem in terms of the terms and conditions, but it does affect search engine rankings for affiliates.
If 600 affiliates all use the same copy for their websites to promote any affiliate program Google and the other search engines will see the duplicate content and not rank those pages as well as they should do.
The answer? Take just 10 minutes, read our program description, read the description on the website and then write your own variation on this copy. Get it to best match your website’s own feel.
I can help affiliates by writing bespoke copy for you, but I can only do this for a very limited number of affiliates.
When writing copy for your pages think about using the following keywords:
Suggested Default Description for PurelyDiamonds: (A great starting point for your own copy)
The founders of Purely Diamonds have been in the diamond industry for over 30 years. We are specialists in the design and manufacture of diamond jewellery—everything from rings and earrings to bracelets, bangles and pendants. We are also experts in the manufacture of Platinum pieces as well as 18-carat yellow and white gold.
Having built up an enviable reputation selling to High Street retailers, we recently took the decision to offer our products direct to public. Why? We can offer substantially lower prices when we sell direct to customers. The benefit is High Street quality without the High Street price.
Almost every item you see on this website has been designed and manufactured in-house in our workshop in London. In fact, we are one of the few genuinely in-house manufacturers still around today. We have a highly skilled team of craftsman who we have been working with for many years.
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I switched my links to the ebay Partner Network when it became live a few months ago. I believe that I have switched all my links, but I am experiencing a drop in the commission that I previously experienced.
This is a little confusing, there has been mixed views from a number of affiliates that I have spoken to. The split is around 1/3 have seen a significant drop, 1/3 have stayed the same and 1/3 have expericend a rise in sales and commissions.
eBay are listing a number of great tools, nice to have them all in one place, but are people using them, or are they just switching links? With the affiliate space becoming alot more competitive use of every tool that affiliate merchants / affiliate networks have to offer is essential. Anything that can be done to enhance a site with the aid of a merchant instead of link and banner dropping must be good.
Probably the most useful tool with ebay is the affiliate RSS feeds. with a little php (other server side scripting languages are available) this can be used in a number of different ways to enhance a site and add unique content.
The next step for myself is to have a look at the eBay API, now freely available - they used to charge! A step up from the RSS feeds. Saving my time I may just invest in BANS
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Is affiliate marketing truly the only no bar to entry online business model?
I believe it is.
To start out in affiliate marketing all you really need is enthusiasm, time, £20 an a little know how. If you don’t have the know how it is easy enough to pick up on the key points following tutorials and advice on forums.
£20 = a years webhosting from many companies. This may not be the best or most scale able BUT it is a very good starting point.
So if you have an idea or passion, preferably that you know others will share and has a good product base behind it it takes just 30 minutes to setup and configure a wordpress install from a server that has fantastico built in - maybe an hour first time to do this without.
That’s it, add content - making it relevant and link to relevant products using your favourite merchants.
Ok. there is a lot of jiggery pokery that you can do with seo, link building and social networking, I am not covering that here. But the basics are as stated above. Passion / website / content. If the content is good and you start plugging to your friends, submitting to directories etc you will start to get sales. Then it is just a case of reinvesting the profits and repeating with another topic. Once you have a few sites under your belt it is time to start getting bolder with your ideas.
This is a slow grow process. But a lot can be achieved from that initial £20 and time.
I cannot see any other business on the internet that can start so small and potentially build so big.
I have seen a lot of people making the mistake of starting an online shop (using oscommerce or similar) putting in their £20 and either dropshipping or spending a fortune on stock then hot having the budget to promote the site.
Yes you can go for the slow grow approach as in the affiliate marketing example above, but you still need to source those products and allow for depreciation if you are holding stock, even with dropshipping you may be required to make a minimum sales a month or pay a fee to access the products.
People have tried for subscription sites and forums. These don’t work without some fantastic content, which could cost the earth to licence, produce, or buy in. The internet is awash with free content. Magazine sites online are supported by advertising rather than subscribers or donations.
What else is there?
Ebay trading, probably, people do make money buying and selling online. You still need stock, but this could be your own belongings that you no longer require.
Domain name trading, not for a newbie. Well unless they are extremely fortunate, or have insider knowledge.
I suppose that the second question is, is affiliate marketing still no bars to entry? Some big voucher site startups had the initial push of a press campaign, which may be very cost effective would still require a good few hundred pounds to get started. Cashback sites, though extremely lucrative need investment is software and staff (customer service on these types of sites can be very time consuming).
My two open questions then:
Is there another online business that could be founded with just £20 and time?
Is entry to affiliate marketing still just time and a few quid for a domain / simple web hosting?
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The Bespoke Gift Company is coming. Well actually may have already seen it.
Remember The Poetry Studio on Affiliate Window? If you do I am here to tell you the site is moving, if not I am telling you about a fantastic newaffiliate program. This new affiliate program will be managed by Scifind Limited
The Poetry Studio is expanding it’s ranges and rebranding in a bid to improve conversions and your profit. The redesigned and rebranded site is scheduled to go live imminently, with the Affiliate Window switch over planned for Monday 7th April 2008.
It is important for you to realise that this will not detrimentally affect your commissions, commission rates, cookies, banners or links. In fact, we are working hard to improve your commissions and opportunities within our affiliate scheme.
All existing unvalidated commissions at the time of switch over will be validated in the normal way. There will be no loss of commissions.
All links will be redirected from the existing site to the new site automatically.
Any cookies that have been generated prior to the switchover date will not be affected.
All existing banners will be switched to the new site branding, there will be no holes in your websites.
There will be no reduction of commissions on current product ranges, although the current product range will be expanded and there will be a new commission tier for the new selection of gifts.
There will be increased opportunity to profit with higher commission tiers awarded at certain levels
The Bespoke Gift Company
Welcome to a shopping experience. A world where the Magic of Giving comes to life. Indulge in our range of exceptional, enchanting gifts. Be inspired by classic or personalised poetry. Create your own art. Celebrate gifts luxuriously crafted by the Uk’s finest, bespoke gift designers. We invite you to enjoy excellent personal service and impeccable quality lovingly offered as standard. Giving truly never felt this good.
The Bespoke Gift Company offers the same fantastic products at ThePoetryStudio, but the range will increase.
If you wish to know more please join The Poetry Studio affiliate program on Affiliate Window (merchant ID 1337) and we will send you more information.
Remember the switchover will be automatic, you will not have to do anything. If you need any further information or help please contact me.
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Ok. I have been fielding some more newbie affiliate marketing questions today.
What an open ended question it is. One person may make £10 a month, one may make £10,000 a month working in the same sector.
In attempt to answer the question, or have potential affiliates put some thought into the actual questions they should be asking I have created this simple tool, just tell it the sector you are working in, your daily site traffic - expected conversions (this can baffle people, and I cannot readily answer) and it will tell you how much you can expect to turn over a month.
The earnings data has been collected from a reliable source and there has been a fair bit of averaging, so I am hoping that the figures look reasonable.
Nah - not talking about your pet pooch, but your website.
There has been alot of talk of ‘Thin Affiliate Websites’ and ‘Long Tail’ in affiliate marketing circles. Not sure what it is all about, then read on.
I best start by defining a ‘thin’ affiliate website.
A thin affiliate website is an affiliate sites that has absolutely no value other than to make money for the affiliate. They have no value to the user and no value to the merchant - I could cite product feed sites, discount sites and cashback sites. But each of these can have it’s value - but at the same time their are hundreds if not thousands of thin affiliate sites in these categories.
Content or a very useful tool. Something that will keep the visitors coming back to your site. Yes use APIs and product feeds, but the big thing is what ever application you create make sure that it is both novel and useful to the members.
Basically look beyond the names of merchants, brands, trademarks and product names and try and develop diverse content for your niche, it is all about content at the end of the day.
For example if you are going to use affilistore (a powerful, free product feed tool) continually add content using the inbuilt CMS. So if you set up an affilistore using the PremierCookware (AffiliateWindow) feed, add recipes, discussion of celebrity chefs, cooking tehniques, discussion of supermarkets, ethical / organic foods and so on and so forth.
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It seems to be the season for big price sales for Affiliate Marketing companies, websites and affiliate networks.
First we hear about the management buyout of DGM / Deal Group Media, the affiliate marketing affiliate network. GetMe In - the concert / event ticket sales site (who have an affiliate program with DGM) were bought by Ticketmaster. The acquisition of HolidayWatchdog by Tripadvisor and AOL / Advertising.com obtaining Buy.at just yesterday.
I am starting to think that 2008 might be an interesting/scary with regards to even more buyouts of both affiliate sites and affiliate network sites.
There are a number of rumors going round at the moment as to who is getting in bed with who, who is looking to float / be bought out by another giant in the industry.
Even Microsoft has been looking at borrowing money to buy out Yahoo - BBC News Story
We will just have to wait and see what happens, but are we looking at the online bubble bursting 2.0?
I honestly don’t think so, but I must say that there are a numer of bigger companies may bite off more than they can chew and vastly decrease their usefullness and productivity of their acquisitions.
I still feel that for the affiliate that 2008 should be a year of innovation, not just more feed sites, comparison sites et al. But development of useful applications. I would like to sit here this time next year and say that 2008 saw the death of cashback sites and a move into more innovation.
Time will tell.
This is me just rambling on with my thoughts, I should get back to work now
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I presume that the reader has some knowledge of how to use wordpress or blogger. If you can install wordpress or drupal on your own site all the better.
Pick a topic, something you know loads about or you just find interesting.
Content always wins, without interesting, funny, relevant content why would anyone visit your site?
Use a Blog package (blogger or wordpress) or CMS (Drupal) to organise your content. (Cost effective web hosting for multiple sites can be found here with fantastico control panel so it takes seconds to add blog or cms software)
If you are using WordPress or other CMS / blogging software RTFM – Read The Flaming Manual. Read how to guides and search support forums for the best configuration options. Especially SEO. Make sure you have any relevant SEO plugins and SEO URL options ticked etc. Get a google sitemap tool if possible
Pick titles carefully. These should contain keywords relevant to your subject and ultimately what you are promoting.
Build your content for a few days / weeks then get started with submitting to sites and services.
Sign up with google webmaster tools, claim your blog or website, submit the sitemap – what no site map? If there is not a sitemap option for your software you can submit the RSS feed as a sitemap.
Sign up with google analytics its free and it will tell you where your traffic comes from.
Claim your blog at Technorati. Look at and add their widgets to your site
Add more content. Keyword and keyphrase loaded content is great for search engine fodder, but I would prefer if it was readable to the site user.
Set up a profile with your URL and add content relevant to your site – mentioning your site where you can, linking where you can. Add URLs to videos and images.
Go to Squidoo and set up a Lens ( this is a page that takes RSS feed from sites and blogs.) Think about the message that you want to achieve and write some unique content for this page. Add the RSS feed from your blog or CMS to squidoo. Look at using the other tools on squidoo to build a lens relevant to your site. (you can add your Flickr photos and Youtube videos here aswell. - If you ebay you can also add your products here)
Take your blog feed and any other social network feeds you create (Youtube, myspace, flickr etc) and add it to
Being lazy – you can add your feeds via software. See here for more
Add submit link tools to your blog / site. Wordpress and Drupal have social bookmark addons.If you have no addons that cover this try http://www.socialbookmarking.marketersgiveaway.com . See below for a list of some of the top social sites. (in no particular order)
Look for sites covering a similar topic, email for a link request – or submit a unique article with a link back to yoursite.
Use forums, but with respect. Contribute but don’t spam. Add your URL to your forum signature (if allowed) and only post your URL when it is relevant. Make sure that you don’t blatantly plug your url on every post.
Add more content – fresh content a couple of times a week is a must.
Revenue – ah yes you actually want to make money from your site. Getting relevant adverts from affiliate networks is easy, just sign up to each network and carefully select products and merchants that are relevant to your subjects. By all means add banners, but be sparing with these. In context links convert the best.
(Back to getting traffic) Check out Yahoo Answers for your subject – answer questions and make sure that you site your own site as the source for the answer, what your site doesn’t cover that exact question, well you should feel another blog post coming on.
Look for Wikis – sites like wikipedia, add relevant content and links back to your site.
Well that is a little food for thought. The social media sector is for ever expanding and new sites become more important and some of the older sites less important each week. This is just a starting point and I hope that it helps some people out there.
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