Hallowe’en is out of the way and the Christmas ads have well and truly started running on the TV. Your serious internet marketeer / affiliate has been working on his Xmas pitch since about July and any day now is going to start reaping the rewards. I, on the other hand, have been far too busy with the new day job and a part time masters degree to pay any attention whatsoever to the forthcoming Winterval. Ooops.
As my recent posts (or lack of them) will have probably hinted I’m not really in the affiliate market these days. But now is as good a time as any to get my head back in the game. In certain sectors of the economy, Christmas sales count for something like 80% of the whole year’s profits. It’s a make or break time for a lot of retailers and it’s silly season for a lot of consumers. Things that never normally sell will be flying off the shelves and you can guarantee the year’s top toy will be as rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth. Making affiliate money at this time of the year should be like shooting cliches in a barrel.
That’s my hope anyway. The voucher code site I set up earlier in the year is still garnering a bit of traffic, has reasonable pagerank and hopefully can be quickly resuscitated to pick up on the Christmas sales frenzy.
But what’s that coming over the hill? Is it a credit crunch? A scary credit crunch?
Yep. Things might be tougher this year. Last Christmas, after I gave you my heart, I made some nice profits on pay per click ads on Facebook. This year, I’m hoping I can rely on organic traffic for my commissions. I’ve got a site or two fairly well established in Google’s eyes now and that should give me a bit of a headstart on last year. I know I’m starting far too late and don’t have anywhere near enough time to dedicate to affiliate work but I do have a powerful incentive. A decent affiliate Christmas and I’ll be seeing in the new year in Sydney Harbour. That’s the plan. Follow it here on Leaving The Day Job by subscribing to the RSS feed.
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!
Today I want to reveal the real me. When I started this blog a year ago I was exploring affiliate marketing as a way out of my deadend day job. I was hoping to make enough money to quit that job but at the same time I didn’t want to burn my bridges. The company I worked for was involved in setting up an affiliate scheme and there was a real chance someone would find my blog and realise I was planning on quitting. Hence I adopted the pseudonym Monty.
Why was I so worried about them finding out? I’m still not 100% sure. There was a healthy dose of paranoia certainly but also I was concerned that they accuse me of a conflict of interest (affiliate by night, quasi affiliate manager by day) or that it would undermine my negotiating power when it came to salary rises. There was also a potential conflict of interest with one of my affiliate sites which promoted a niche my employer was also active in.
Needless to say that none of these potential conflicts actually occurred. I was very careful not to do anything which was underhand or abused my position. In fact, by the time I was really getting going as an affiliate my employer had effectively pulled the plug on their own programme.
Yesterday was my last day working in that job. As I’ve previously blogged I’m moving into a new role working in the public sector from Monday and at last I feel I’m able to step out from the shadows and reveal my true identity.
So hello, I’m Simon Briggs and I’m an affiliate.
Yesterday evening UK time Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone and the much-promised mobile internet was born.
There have been many attempts at internet on the move in recent years but something has always held it back. No single device has covered all the bases. The new iPhone knocks those previous attempts to the floor and batters them to a pulp.
My much loved Nokia N95 has 3G and a competent built in browser but the screen is too tiny for surfing, there’s no QWERTY keyboard and until recently Vodafone’s data pricing made the mobile internet an expensive and unpredictable proposition. The built in wifi is good but you need to install a third party app such as Devicescape to make hopping onto wifi hotspots a breeze.
The new iPhone brings the Apple handset into the 21st century with 3G for high speed mobile internet access and has the customary huge screen, excellent Safari browser and multi touch interface. But what’s really going to kickstart the mobile web on the iPhone is the pricing.
At last the iPhone is available on the sort of price deals that UK and European mobile users expect. An 18 month £35 contract gets you 600 minutes and the handset is just £99. You can even get the 8GB model for free if you’re prepared to pay £45 a month. All tariffs include unlimited 3G browsing and unlimited wifi browsing via The Cloud and BT Openzone.
Pay as you go pricing is apparently “coming soon”. That opens the iPhone up to the mass market who don’t want or can’t get a contract.
The techy crowd are still bemoaning the low spec 2 megapixel camera that doesn’t include a flash and certainly that’s the feature that is a bit of a downer for me, but the mass market mobile phone users really don’t care that much about the camera. People don’t really expect their phones to take fantastic shots they just want to be able to take a few snaps when they’re out down the pub.
Of more interest to the techies though is the App Store. Apple have opened up development of iPhone applications and provided a one stop shop for selling your wares. This could be huge. What sells Windows isn’t the operating system it’s the applications you can run on it. No phone so far has had a wealth of applications that can easily be installed by the average Joe User. The iPhone may just be the first one that does.
So for us affiliates now is the time to start building the mobile web. I think we’re going to see a huge land grab over the next 6-12 months. It may not be immediately profitable but it’s going to be like Web 2.0 all over again : get users, build loyalty, monetise when you can. This is the mobile web 2.0 and it’s going to be massive.
Adroll is an interesting new ad network I found via Techcrunch this morning. The idea is that Adroll allows groups of similar sites to get together and combine their advertising inventory. This combined inventory is then sold by Adroll for more than the individual sites would be able to get selling their own space.
The best bit as far as I’m concerned though is that it works alongside your existing Adsense advertising. The Adroll widget will show your usual Adsense ads and only replace them if they can get a better price through their own network. It would seem that there’s nothing to lose if you already run Adsense on your site.
I’ve just signed up this morning and created a community for UK Affiliate Blogs. If you fancy joining me, sign up with Adroll and join the community and we’ll see what happens. You might not be able to find the community straight away in which case leave a comment below or contact me through my contact form and I’ll send you an invite by email.
Woohoo! I’ve just found out I’ve won a free ticket to the a4uAwards in London’s swanky Park Lane Hotel.
Event organisers Existem had been running a competition to guess the name of the celebrity presenter for this year’s awards and yours truly got it on the second clue. It’s amazing what you can discover with a quick Google search and a Wikipedia page!
So me plus guest will be donning our finest on June 5th to see Michael McIntyre handing out the gongs. I’ve never been to a black tie event before - I’m thinking they don’t mean jeans, t-shirt and a black tie so I’d better head off to Moss Bros!
Now all I need to do is have a little affiliate success so I don’t feel a complete fraud surrounded by all the award winners.
UPDATE: Much to my annoyance I’ve discovered I can’t make it to the ceremony. I’d misread the date and not realised I have something else I can’t get out of. Grrrrr!
An interesting article at Techcrunch UK highlights that 70 percent of UK web users surf at the same time as watching TV. Nice to know it’s not just me. Quite often I’m doing something unrelated to the TV programme but I also tend to look up actors’ biographies or go off at a tangent and research something that was referred to in the programme.
The bit of the Techcrunch article which caught my eye though was this bit : “…adults who surf the web for content related to what they’re watching on TV are at the same time searching for products which appeared in the show….”. This is ideal territory for the affiliate who’s quick off the mark with their PPC campaigns.
For example, I remember watching the first series of Torchwood and thinking, “what’s that bluetooth earpiece Jack’s wearing?”. Doubtless other people thought the same and if you’d been quick enough you could have found the right headset, grabbed an affiliate link and set up a PPC campaign before the end credits had rolled.
Or if you’re a fan of cookery or home improvement shows you could be advertising the products used and save people searching around for them. Most people don’t know how to use Google properly to do their own research so they’ll likely search for something like “Property Ladder dado rail”. If you’ve done the research for them you can take them straight to the product they’ve been looking at on the TV a few minutes earlier.
With some popular shows appearing on BBC3 a few days before they run on the more mainstream BBC1Â you can get a headstart on those PPC campaigns before the great unwashed masses see the programme.
As a geek and a paid up member of Liberty I take a close interest in internet privacy and it’s been all over the news for the past week or so. There has been a huge outcry and backlash against Phorm who have signed deals with major ISPs to track their users’ browsing habits and serve them targeted ads.
You can see to the right of this article that I’m linking to one of the anti-Phorm campaign sites. But as an affiliate my income depends on being able to track users as they move from my site to the merchants and retaining that tracking for perhaps 30 or more days. How can I be pro-privacy, anti-Phorm and an affiliate all at the same time?
Trading potatoes and sheep
Our economic system is built upon the notion of trading. Way back in history we would eat only what we foraged or hunted. Later we came up with agriculture and grew our own food. Then some bright spark came up with trading. I grow potatoes, you rear sheep. I exchange something I have for something you have. We agree on a price which is acceptable to both of us and a trade is made.
Google provides free web search but they still need to pay their staff. What am I prepared to trade in order to get access to that site? My attention, my time and my interests have a value. An advertiser will pay for targeted access to my attention for the time that I’m using Google. That’s the trade that we make in order for me to get access to free search, email and so forth.
Similarly, a supermarket shopper can sign up for a reward card to collect points and get discounts. This involves handing over some personal details about your shopping habits in return for those discounts. Personally, I don’t have rewards cards but a lot of people do. To them, that personal information is worth the value of the discounts they’ll get. To me, my privacy is more valuable and I’m not going to make that trade. That’s the choice we make.
Trust
Phorm want your personal browsing history to sell to advertisers as a profile. Your browsing history has a value to them. Would you let them have it? Maybe if you trusted them and got something good in return you would. But Phorm have a history of distributing spyware and the ISPs have been less than transparent about how the system will work. Can you trust them with your info? You might trust a supermarket chain with details of your shopping but would you trust them if they started telling your doctor how often you bought booze or your wife when you bought condoms?
There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of Phorm and frankly they’re offering me nothing in return, certainly nothing to the value I place on the private data they want from me.
Afilliates
And what about affiliates? Yes, we make use of tracking cookies to enable our business and, no, a lot of the time our visitors aren’t aware that this is happening. The difference is how we use tracking cookies. We are not building a browsing history. We aren’t identifying a single user visiting multiple sites. We don’t set cookies that last for years. We’re just using them to track the success of our referrals and to claim the reward we are due for introducing the customer and the merchant. I’m happy that the use of cookies in affiliate marketing is above board. A website visitor can always set their browser to reject third party cookies or clear out their cookies at the end of a session if it suits them.
Profiling based on browsing history is a lucrative business but it’s also very difficult to do it correctly on an anonymous basis. When AOL released anonymized search history for their users back in 2006 it very quickly became apparent that individuals could be identified from the history of terms they searched for. We don’t know that we can trust Phorm with that data, we derive no benefit from them having it and we should err on the side of caution and resist this invasion of our privacy.
A week ago I wrote my blog posting (Not) Leaving The Day Job. It obviously struck a chord with a lot of people, I received some encouraging comments here on the site and the post was one of the highest rated on Affiliates4U for most of the last week. Here’s the update on what’s been happening since.
I mentioned last week that my strategy now is to concentrate on content. I wanted to write one posting a day on at least one site. I’ve sort of kept to that. I’m slowly soft-launching what I would call my first proper site : Vibration Platform and have been adding a few articles during the course of the week. The site is starting to pick up a little organic search traffic and I’ve been supplementing it over the past day or two with some PPC. At the moment I’m spending a few pence a day on PPC and making a quid or two a day on AdSense. Nothing sensational but once I build up enough content I can start looking at some link building. I’m aiming for it mainly to run on organic SEO traffic.
Discounting
I’ve also started setting up a discount codes site. This is a bit of bandwagon-jumping that I’ve been umming and ahhing over for a while. In the day job as a merchant’s employee I doubt the value of 99% of the voucher sites out there. The good ones attract new customers and incentivise them but for the most part they’re just brand name squatting and often dropping cookies in exchange for non-existent discount codes. But I’ve finally decided that if you can’t beat them, join them. If other people get away with it, why should I sit back and miss out?
This is going to be another Wordpress-driven site. I’m getting pretty hot at setting them up now and familiarity with the platform builds confidence in making the most of it. Wordpress really is surprisingly powerful if you understand it and spend a bit of time thinking things through before you start.
I’m hesitating at the moment over whether I should go down the “click here to reveal the discount code” route. For those not in the know, the idea is that you tell people you have a discount code for a particular merchant but require them to click a link to reveal that code. At the same time as revealing the code you open the merchant site in a new window and therefore drop your affiliate cookie. Some less honest voucher sites will make you go through this process just to tell you there is no offer. They still get the commission though because of the cookie drop. Other affiliates just post the code right there on the page assuming that enough people will follow their affiliate link to the merchant to outweigh the number who were already on the merchant site and just looking for a discount code.
I’m inclined towards the”click for code” approach as part of my “why shouldn’t I when other people get awat with it?” strategy. I’m not going to cheat people by claiming to have codes when I don’t, I’m not going to nick other affiliates’ codes and I’m going to display expiry dates where appropriate. Is it so much to ask that I get the reward for supplying useful discounts to the customer? Still not 100% sure on this one. Flame me in the comments if you have a strong opinion one way or the other.
Tweaking
This week, I’ve also been wrestling with some performance problems on my server. I have a Linux VPS which is fantastic as I get all the tweaking fun of a real server but at a lower cost. The problem is that I get a lot less RAM than I would on a real server and my Apache server seems to delight in eating it all up and then demanding hard drive swap space for dessert. Have you ever tried to understand the Apache config files? I have and I don’t recommend it to the faint of heart. I’ve got more parameters in there than I care to care about and I suspect my tweaking may yet prove fatal. If this blog goes offline, you’ll know why.
A-PeelingÂ
Over at my long-standing (and much neglected) site Friday Emails, I’ve been toying with the peel-away ads that I saw mentioned on Ray’s blog. This is a site I’ve been running for about three years now and easily predates my attempts at serious affiliate marketing. I’ve never successfully monetised it other than with a bit of AdSense income. I’ve got a Yahoo dating ad as the peel-away at the moment but that’s just temporary. Need something suitably international though as more than two-thirds of the traffic is non-UK.
Friday Emails used to be regularly updated and I had a regular weekly mailing to over 3000 subscribers but it only ever managed to break even and some time last year I lost interest in updating it. It’s on my todo list for some time way off in the future.
Reading
Finally, I’ve bought a book. A proper paper one with pages and a cover. It’s called Getting Things Done by David Allen. Subtitled “How to achieve stress-free productivity”, it’s apparently a big favourite amongst us geek types because of the focus on systems, classifications and methods. What I’ve read so far seems great. Needless to say that, as far as reading it goes, I’m not getting things done. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
It was June of last year when I set up this blog and, at the time, “Leaving The Day Job” seemed like an achievable goal. I was hoping that by the end of the year I’d be free from the 9 to 5 yoke.
Yet here I am, eight months later, still working in the same day job with no sign of ever making it into even part-time self-employment let alone taking the plunge full-time.
So what went wrong?
Well, it turns out to be harder than I might have imagined to make money online. I had a bit of luck initially and made about 50% of my monthly salary in my first month as an affiliate. And I thought that was it. I thought I was a genius. Of course, it turned out that what I was doing (advertising gambling on Google) was a bit naughty and the big G caught up with me and cut off that lucrative revenue stream.
After that I tried numerous other ideas but they all had one thing in common. I wasn’t doing anything original. The usual suspects: dry, me-too, feed-driven sites; Adwords landing pages; gambling; insurance; mobile phones. And I wasn’t doing any of them particularly well.
Most of the time I was recycling retailers’ copy from their product feeds or when I did write my own copy I did it with little to no regard for SEO or indeed coherency to the reader. I wasn’t writing salesy copy, I wasn’t pre-selling the product, I wasn’t adding any value.
Of course, I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. It just seemed too hard. I knew I was getting it wrong but nothing I tried seemed to work. Despondency kicked in.
I don’t take well to failure. I don’t like not being able to do something. If I can’t do something right first time I tend to give up and sulk. Needless to say this isn’t a very helpful attitude when you’re trying to be self-employed. There’s no one there to tell you to get on with it. If you give up, the whole enterprise falls.
Meanwhile, at the day job, things weren’t going well. The company’s doing poorly but not so poorly that there’s any immediate threat of redundancy. So I’m feeling dragged down but without the fear of unemployment that might give me a kick up the arse to get on with my own thing.
Christmas came and I had some success with Facebook Ads, doing direct to merchant for one particular merchant. I closed out December with a profit of several hundred pounds. Better than nothing but nowhere near as good as I had hoped.
January was cold and barren. Motivation at an all time low. This is the point at which I could have given up.
Then something happened. Spring sprung. The world started to wake up a little. The mornings and the evenings were a little lighter every day. I started to see where I was going wrong. I had been looking for the quick win. Looking for a get rich quick scheme then running off after another idea when the first one didn’t start to deliver in time. I realised no one else was going to do this for me. Friends were starting to say that they didn’t think I had it in me to succeed in this business. That did it. If there’s one thing I hate more than failure it’s people telling me I can’t do something.
So I have renewed enthusiasm and a new strategy. It’s all about the content. My goal is at least one new posting on one (preferably more) of my sites every day. Every day do one thing that will add value to one of my sites.I’ve got a new site which is soft-launching at the moment. I’ll blog about it in a few days when things should hopefully have started rolling a bit more.
I think the theme of this blog will be shifting a bit as well. I’ve got away from telling the story of my efforts to leave the day job and been blogging more general affiliate stuff recently. I’m intending to go back to my roots and talk more about the ups and downs of getting started. Expect more coverage of motivation, organisation and fitting self employed work in around fulltime employment and the demands of friends, family and household chores.
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