Leaving The Day Job

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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starting to pick up some PageRank and search engine traffic but without the time to update it the codes are getting out of date and commission is falling.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 This week I dropped a couple of others which were becoming a waste of bandwidth as the content was too out of date to be of interest to anyone.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.

I’ve noticed that my blogroll over there on the right hand side is a bit on the small side. I’ve also noticed that I don’t have many incoming links to this blog. So I’ve stumbled upon a genius scheme which I’m going to call “reciprocal link building”. If you’ve got an affiliate or make money online type blog and you add a link to my site I’ll “reciprocate” by adding a link back to you. I know! It’s genius isn’t it? I can’t believe no one has thought of it before.

So if you meet the simple criteria below and have a link to this site from your blog please contact me through the link above or the comments form below and I’ll add a link back to you in my blogroll.

The criteria are simply to weed out spammers, if your blog doesn’t meet the criteria but is still decent drop me a line anyway.

• Blog must be affiliate or make money online based with mostly on topic posts
• Must be an established, active blog eg not just two posts both written six months ago
• Not be just a veiled attempt to sell something

I have a rather lovely Nokia N95 mobile phone which sports a powerful (if memory intensive) web browser. I often read web sites on it during my lunch break and I’m always pleased when a website automatically downgrades itself to a mobile-friendly version when it detects my phone.

I wanted the same thing for this blog and thought I’d found it when I got a beta invite for MoFuse via an article at Read/Write Web. MoFuse takes your RSS feed and dynamically generates a mobile version of your website. Unfortunately they don’t know how to parse the RSS from Wordpress properly so all my posts ended up truncated at 80 or so words. After several emails back and forth to their support desk who insisted the problem was with Feedburner despite me sending them the raw XML from Feedburner which clearly has the full post in it, I gave up.

Next to try out was Winksite. This is basically the same idea as MoFuse (and indeed predates MoFuse). This worked out fine and was able to display my posts in full (using exactly the same RSS feed which MoFuse failed with). It’s also quite customizable in terms of design and adds various social network type features. My main problem with it was that I couldn’t see any way easily to integrate with my existing blog. I want people to be able to type in the same URL on whatever device and see the correct version of my site.

Finally I found Andy Moore’s Wordpress Mobile Plugin. It’s a standard Wordpress plugin which as usual is a doddle to set up. It does the automatic detection that I wanted and also has various customization options including the ability to post from your mobile and to add advertising to your mobile blog. You can repay the author for his hard work by configuring a revenue share percentage within the plugin (I’ll do this once I figure out how the AdMob advertising platform works, Andy!)

So there you have it. Next time you’re out and about with your mobile or PDA and have a few minutes to kill check out the mobile version of my blog at the usual address : www.leavingthedayjob.com

I’ve moved this blog away from Blogger to a self-hosted Wordpress installation. Wordpress has all the features I’ve been missing and is generally more modern and expandable blogging platform. But then you knew all that already. The question of why I was using Blogger to start with can be ignored for now.

Here’s a quick couple of notes about what I had to do in the hope that they might help someone one day. I’m assuming a fair degree of familiarity with both Blogger and Wordpress.

I used these instructions as my basis but they needed some tweaking to work with Blogger’s new templates. This method should enable you to migrate your content, redirect your RSS feeds (if you use Feedburner) and redirect your old site pages to your new one. The one thing it can’t do is transfer your Google PageRank as this requires the use of 301 redirects which you can’t do on Blogspot.

1) Obtain the latest version of Wordpress. Create a database and install as described in the Wordpress documentation

2) Log in to your Wordpress admin panel. Click Manage - Import - Blogger. Enter your Blogger login details. Wait for a bit and all your posts should be copied over from Blogger to your new site.

3) (Optional) Assuming that you are using Feedburner for your RSS feed: login to Feedburner and change the source of your feed to your new site eg www.yourdomain.com/feed . Install the FeedSmith plugin - this will automagically redirect requests for your RSS feed to your Feedburner feed instead.

4) This is the fun bit. You need to redirect traffic from your old Blogger blog to your new Wordpress blog.

4a) Download the from_blogger.php file from here and save it to the root of your Wordpress site.

4b) Paste the following code into your Blogger template (I put it just after the opening <body> tag)

<script language='javascript'><!--
var process_page="http://www.yournewwebsite.com/from_blogger.php";
var newpage=process_page;
var oldlink=document.location.href;

newpage+="?p="+oldlink;
newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();
document.location.href=newpage;
//--></script>

4c) Paste the following into your Blogger tempate’s <head>element

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.yournewwebsite.com" />

4d) Paste the following somewhere into your Blogger template’s <body> element

<div style='position: absolute; top: 30px; left: 30px; border: solid 2px #333; color: #000; background-color: yellow; padding: 5px; width: 350px; z-index: 5;'>
<p><strong>My blog has moved!  Redirecting…</strong></p>
<p>You should be automatically redirected.  If not, visit <a href='http://www.yournewwebsite.com/'>http://www.yournewwebsite.com</a> and update your bookmarks.</p>
</div>

In theory what should happen is that visitors to your old blog will be redirected to the same article on the new site. The way it works is by capturing the last part of your Blogger page’s url eg my-great-post.html and searching for a post with the slug ‘my-great-post’ in your Wordpress blog. Unfortunately Blogger and Wordpress don’t always agree on how to create that slug so you may need to go through each post individually and check that the slugs match up. To do this go to Manage - Posts and Edit each one. The slug is displayed on the right hand side of the edit page under ‘Post slug’.

I’ve tried to write this as quickly as possible while the process is still fresh in my mind but in rushing I’ve probably not explained myself very clearly. Post in the comments if you have problems and I’ll try to assist.

I’m in the process of moving this blog from Blogspot to a self-hosted Wordpress installation. Since I’m using Feedburner the RSS feed should seamlessly redirect without any problems. On the other hand it might all go pear-shaped and I apologise in advance if thirty odd posts all turn up at once on Affiliates4U and internetmarketingblogs.co.uk