How Much Money Can I Make Out Of Affiliate Marketing?

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.

I would love feedback on this - so let me know.

Affiliate Marketing Profit Tool

March 28th, 2008 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing, tools | 2 comments

Free Stuff - My Top 5 Open Source Applications

5) osCommerce

I have a sort of love hate relationship with osCommerce, it is a fantasticly powerful, FREE opensource shopping cart software. The bug I have with it is that it does take alot of customisation and plugins to get the application ready for a spacific project. I am now starting to lean towards xcart as software of choice, it is not free - but you get the source code and are able to customise. Again you do need customisation, but you get support (beyond free forums) and there are several great options

4) Drupal

This is my CMS of choice, nice clean with loads of addons. I actually packaged up the software with a selection of great plugins a while ago. It is still available for download from this site

3) FireFox

Ok this is my second browser. Doing website building work I need to get things running in the most popular browser first, then check in FF. Firefox has a fantastic array of plugins and toolbars, and I am probably very guilty of not using FF as much as I should.

2)Word press.

Blog Software, you are looking at an example now.

1) Open Office

Ah yes. Why pay microsoft hundreds when you can get it for free? (There are some very good reasons to use microsoft office, but I will gloss over that just now) Mostly compatible with Microsoft Office, Open Office has a spreadsheet, wordprocessor, database and presentation software that can be used to open, view and edit the microsoft equivelents. The big drawback is that OO is NOT compatable with Microsoft Macros - but has its own macro language.

October 19th, 2007 Posted by admin | tools, oscommerce, xcart, x-cart, php | no comments

5 Essential Links for The Affiliate Marketeer

Just thought I would share 5 of the most useful links that I have at the moment.

I am not going to list networks (they are already listed in the navbar on the right). But I am going to list the 5 most commonly used links by myself at the moment.

1. Google.com

Ok - this is a bit of a cheat, but despite the problems that google brings and the reputation it has of a nonstop monster eating up the web, it does have a plethora of great tools. Excluding the search, adwords, adsense, there are also maps, analytics and unfortunately it is very difficult to get away from it.

2. InternetMarketingBlogs.co.uk

There are so many quality blogs out there that I read on a daily basis - it would be mad to try and list them, let alone pick a handful to fit into the top 5 links. So this service covers all of them. It is quick and easy to get a grasp of what is going on and follow up in detail on the original blog.

3. php.net

Being a fond user of PHP MYSQL this site is fantastic, THE manual to PHP programming. My brain is not big enough to fit all the functions that I use on a weekly basis.

4. AffiliateBounty

Need to find out if a company has an affiliate program? This site is fantastically easy to use, though unfortunately not definitive - yet.

5. SEOChat

Some great seo / keyword tools. If you are not already familiar with this site go and have a look, there is too much to cover here.

Other top links - The Weekly Q, Bumpzee, Facebook, Youtube, BBC News

July 10th, 2007 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing, affiliate, tools | one comment

Which Dragon Has The Best Website

Ok this is another post about BBC 2’s Dragon’s Den and we have only had one episode to date.

Having a look at the official website for Dragon’s Den (www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden) I had the idea to write a review on each of the ‘Dragon’s’ official Websites. After seeing Keith Bond’s post about SEOmoz I decided to use this to assess which of these official Dragon’s sites are the best.

Deborah Meaden

http://www.deborahmeaden.com/ 

Page Strength: 0.5 / 10

Duncan Bannatyne

http://www.bannatyne.co.uk/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10

Peter Jones

http://www.peterjones.tv/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10 

Richard Farleigh

http://www.farleigh.com/

Page Strength: 3 / 10

Theo Paphitis

http://www.theopaphitis.com/

Page Strength: 2.5 / 10

So there we have it Jones and Bannatyne tie first followed by Farleigh, Paphitis and finally Meaden. To be honest this is probably the order I would rank these in, only in a general webpage sense, the fact is that these people’s websites are carried by the people - brands. This sort of ranking tool is much more useful for you and me, affiliates especially.

Want to know your sites page Strength - see http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

February 12th, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, webdesign, Dragon's Den | no comments

2007 UK Affiliate Key Dates For Sales!

With Christmas now a distant memory here is a list of dates in 2007 that could be useful for gift sites.

Feburary 14th Valentines Day

Feburary 20th Shrove Tuesday

March 1st St Davids Day (Wales)

March 17th St Patricks Day (Ireland)

March 18th Mothering Sunday / Mothers Day

April EASTER 6th Good Friday, 9th Easter Monday

April 23rd St Georges Day (England)

May bank holidays - 7th and 28th

June 17th Father’s Day

October 31st Halloween

November 5th Guy Fawkes Night - Fireworks

November 30th - St Andrews Day

February 6th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, British, tools | no comments

Affiliate Toolbox Part 2 - Web Design and Doing it right.

CSS Layout Generators

http://www.ibdjohn.com/csstemplate/ - OK but seems to be a little buggy in producing the CSS code

http://www.csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php This is the best little free utility to produce a basic CSS template that I have found online. This is nice and easy to use - with a really sweet colour slide to select colours. The CSS produced is spot on aswell.

As with all of these things you are left with a skeleton with which there will be alot of work in notepad / dreamweaver etc to get the site looking as you want. Once the template is finished the next step is to check that the site is working as it should.

The most obvious way to do this is check in a browser, in fact as many browsers as yo can find.

Then validate the code:

Start point is http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

The way the web is going valid css xhtml is more and more important. I am one person who still uses tables, but I am slowly weening myself into the world of DIVs, SPANs and CSS

Next thing is to validate the site.

I have found that http://sitescore.silktide.com/ is fantastic for this. Not only does it validate your code, it checks for incomming links, checks your title tags and gives you a full report and score out of ten for your site. There are 130 tests performed on the site!

Results are cached for 30 days - so you cannot check, change, check every few hours when tweeking a site. You can register for an account - as a registered user you can generate reports at smaller time intervals,

This site is very strict so FOLLOW it’s advice.

January 31st, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, Web2.0, webdesign, css, valid html, xhtml | no comments

Very usefull Affiliate news site.

Keith Bond has just released the Beta version of his Affiliate Marketing RSS aggrigator site www.internetmarketingblogs.co.uk

And I must say that it is a very usefull tool. There are so many quality affiliate blogs out there that it is quickly becoming a nightmare to keep up with them all. But using Keith’s site makes this alot easier.

In addition to affiliate marketing there is the official network feeds and SEO channels.
 

January 30th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, SEO, tools | no comments

Affiliate Toolbox - Part 1 PPC tools.

I have been having a sort out of my IE7 favourites and I have found a bunch of useful tools to anyone building websites.

Firstly for PPC marketers.

There is the Free Keyword List generator. Ideal for Google Adwords campaigns, Yahoo Search Marketing etc. And also usefull for generating key terms for SEOd websites. Essentially you add terms in upto 5 different keyword lists and they are meshed together.

For Example. If I am creating a campaign for FORBIDDENPLANET and I want to market Doctor Who products via Google Adwords I could use 3 lists. First list has the call to action style words (buy, get, order) the second box has variations on our main product brand (Doctor Who ,Doctor wo, Dr Who) and the third has product types from that brand (Toys,DVDs,Action Figures ) we then select PHRASE MATCH and click generate. We then get 27 key phrases to use, like:

“Buy  Doctor Who  Toys”
“Buy  Doctor Who  DVDs”
“Buy  Doctor Who  Action Figures”
“Buy  Doctor wo Toys”
“Buy  Doctor wo DVDs”
“Buy  Doctor wo Action Figures”
“Buy   Dr Who Toys”
“Buy   Dr Who DVDs”
“Buy   Dr Who Action Figures”
“Order Doctor Who  Toys”

And so on.

This is a very powerful tool - especially when when used with SEO Chat Keyword Typo Generator tool or the MSN adcenter keyword mutator- for the Brand name variations.

Using this it is possible to generate THOUSANDS of key phrases in a very short time.

January 29th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, SEO, tools | no comments