Since I started my new full-time job six weeks ago my involvement in affiliate marketing has declined to virtually zero. But I still log in every now and again to check my stats and it’s particularly pleasing to see the odd pound or two adding up knowing that I’ve done bugger all to earn it this month.
Of course this won’t last forever - content gets stale and PageRank slips away - but it’s nice to see at least enough residual income to cover my hosting costs. It’s pleasing to see my discount code site starting to pick up some PageRank and search engine traffic but without the time to update it the codes are getting out of date and commission is falling. I’ll need to make a decision on its future soon.
I’ve already pruned a few of my sites. I moved to new hosting a couple of months ago and didn’t bother to move some of the sites I’d lost interest in. This week I dropped a couple of others which were becoming a waste of bandwidth as the content was too out of date to be of interest to anyone. I’ve redirected them through affiliate links to merchants covering similar markets just in case I pick up any organic traffic but they’ll soon drop from the search engines.
As well as my day job and the odd little bit of affiliate work I’ve been helping a friend out with a charity web project which has involved giving myself a crash course in Joomla. Joomla, as I’m sure you know, is an open source content management system (CMS). It’s like Wordpress on steroids. It’s much more complicated to set up and seriously bamboozling to the uninitiated but the array of plugins is amazing. Everything from RSS feeds to forums to full blown ecommerce systems can be dropped in and it’s all infinitely customisable with CSS and PHP.
I’ll be posting some more about Joomla in the future as I’m keen to use it in a project of my own. Not quite sure yet what I want to do with it but I’m thinking of relaunching my ageing email humour site Friday Emails and using Joomla to expand it out with more features. It might make an interesting serious of blog postings to follow its development and give some pointers for others looking to use Joomla.
That’s all from me for now - just a quick update to say I’m still alive. Now I’m off to catch up on all the other affiliate blogs I’ve not read for a month and a half!