Leaving The Day Job

Archive for the ‘tips’ Category

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Most of the time we’re struggling to get our sites INTO Google but sometimes you need to get them OUT of Google quickly. It’s easily done but a fiddle to find.

In my case, I wanted to get my old Blogspot version of Leaving The Day Job removed from Google. I’d moved the blog a few months back but there’s no way of doing a 301 redirect from Blogspot and Google was still listing my old posts at an address which just 404ed. I also suspect that this is keeping down the PageRank for this new site as Google will see it as duplicate content.

If you have your site set up and authenticated within Google’s Webmaster Tools you can simply remove URLs using the Tools/ Remove URLs option. Otherwise you need to use their Webpage Removal Request Tool. In my case I simply wanted to remove an out of date link but there are also various options for requesting removal of a third party’s web page including obscene material, lists of credit card numbers etc.

I simply input the link, gave it a couple of days and hey presto Google’s out of date links to my old blog were gone. Of course, outdated or non-existent pages will eventually disappear from the results anyway as Google gradually recrawls the web but this is a quick and easy way to give the big G a nudge.

OK, so that’s a bit of a linkbait post title and I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers or to have made a huge fortune but I am going to detail what’s worked for me so far with Facebook ads. Standard disclaimer stuff: this is what works for me, your mileage may vary etc etc

First off, I think you need a different frame of mind dealing with Facebook ads than with your standard PPC ads. With the likes of Adwords you’re wanting to find people who are searching for a product, ready to buy it with their credit card clasped firmly in their hot little paw. Facebook users, on the other hand, aren’t looking to buy anything, they’re looking at their mate’s wedding photos or attacking someone’s vampire/zombie/whatever. Facebook ads are more about saying “hey, look at this cool product, you might like it” rather than “hey, here’s the thing you’re looking for, now buy it”.

Obviously, Christmas is fast approaching and so the products that are doing well for me are gifts. I’m taking advantage of the demographic targeting on Facebook to put the ads in front of people who I think are likely to buy them as gifts for someone else. So if you were selling kid’s toys for example, you might want to target married people over thirty. Choose a product which is unusual and has an interesting photo. Facebook ads have very little space for text and a picture says a thousand words. Use the title to get attention and gear it towards the audience you’re targeting. Use the ad body to bullet point one or two key features and include a call to action.

As I’ve previously blogged, Facebook ads seem to be hooked up to some kind of random number generator where money is concerned. Unlike Adwords you don’t get told what the minimum bid is, nor do you get any idea of how many impressions you’re likely to get for any given bid. What you do you get though is an estimate of how many people match your chosen demographic profile. If your targeting is too precise you’ll end up with a couple of dozen users in your potential audience; too broad and there’ll be millions of them. I suspect that Facebook some how takes the size of the audience into consideration along with your PPC bid when deciding which ad to show. But I’ll be damned if I can find any rhyme or reason to it!

So how do we choose a bid amount? My technique so far is a fairly unsophisticated method called trial and error. I start a new ad at 10c per click and wait to see what happens. If the ad start rolling merrily away I reduce the bid and see what happens. If it stubbornly refuses to show itself I up the bid. You can change the bid at any time and it seems that that immediately affects your click cost but the decision as to whether your ad actually runs or not seems to happen less often.

As an example, I created an ad this afternoon with a bid of 10c. After half an hour nothing had happened. Impressions stayed on zero. So I went up to 20c, 50c and then, in frustration, a dollar and still nothing happened. I put it back to 50c and left it. An hour or so later I logged back in to see that I’d had several thousand impressions and one click at 22c. I took the bid down to 10c and the ad carried on rolling. So the advice there is not to be in too much of a rush to see the outcome of your bid changes. And conversely, don’t leave a high bid unsupervised as it might suddenly start draining your balance. I’ve also noticed that if you change your daily maximum spend during the day, the change won’t kick in til the following day. So if you hit your max spend by lunchtime you don’t seem to be able to restart your ads until the morning.

This is still a small scale trial and so far my ad spend is only in double figures but at least I’m making a positive return on investment. Whether this is scaleable longer term and to larger amounts remains to be seen. We need to bear in mind that the more targeted our ads the sooner ad fatigue will kick in because we’ll keep showing the same ad to the same people. I think a possible route to success is in creating lots of mini campaigns, tightly targeted, keeping a close eye on ROI and killing them when they stop making steady profits.

Merchant product feeds are a great way to add a load of products to your affiliate website quickly. If you’re using something like Affilistore you can knock up a money-earning website in no time at all. The trouble with feeds is that they tend to be all or nothing and as we all know our affiliate sites need to be niche-focused. Getting the products you need out of a feed can be helped a great deal by the command line tools which come built in to Macs and Linux.

Geek alert! This is one way of achieving the task which makes sense to a geek like me. It’s not for everyone. If you are scared of typing commands and want a point and click approach this one isn’t for you.

First thing, you need to get to the command line. On Macs this is done by running the Terminal app which you will find in the Applications / Utilities. Different versions of Linux work in different ways but you’re looking for something called terminal or shell which will probably be in a ’system’ or ‘utilities’ menu.

Next you need to find your way to an easy to use directory. You should be able to do this by typing :

cd Desktop

if you type :

ls

at this point you should see a listing of the files you have on your desktop.

Download your product feed from the affiliate network website onto your desktop. We’ll assume that it’s called feed.csv. We need to extract the first line of the file, which has all the column names in it and place it into our output file. This we do by typing:

head -n 1 feed.csv > output.csv

Then we want to search through the feed file and extract every product which matches our search text. Say we want to find all the Bob the Builder products, we type:

grep -i "bob the builder" feed.csv >> output.csv

Notice the -i option which means we are doing a case-insensitive search and the double > means we are adding to the existing file not overwriting it.

And that’s about it. If you searched for a more generic term you might need to open the CSV file in a spreadsheet programme and edit the results a bit.

This may all seem geeky but it’s very effective and very fast. I just cut a 330 meg feed file down to just 14k in less than a minute using this technique. A 14k file I can finetune by hand; a 330 meg file is a non-starter.

Whether they’re the chocolate kind or the internet kind, cookies are great.

When I was at school a million years ago the most popular kid in the playground was the one who brought the packet of mini chocolate cookies for a break time snack. Don’t ask me why but it was always more satisfying to scrounge a cookie than a handful of Wotsits, Square crisps or Snaps.

Here in the internet age cookies have acquired a new meaning. They’re the little snippets of data a website sends to your browser so it can recognise you when you come back again. They’re essential to affiliate marketing. When a visitor clicks on your affiliate link they receive a cookie from the merchant’s website and then, if they buy something, the merchant uses the cookie data to know which affiliate they should be paying.

The best thing about cookies is that they don’t go away if the visitor doesn’t buy straight away. It stays in the browser and most merchants will pay out if the visitor comes back to buy something at a later date (generally up to 30 days). I’ve been discovering in the last couple of days just how good this can be. I’ve had several sales now where the actual transaction took place weeks after the visitor originally clicked my link. It means that the long barren period earlier in the month where I was making virtually nothing isn’t as bad as it seemed. It also shows that you shouldn’t write off an idea too soon. The customer might have bookmarked the offer to return to after payday.

There are a couple of complications after all nothing is ever simple. Firstly, merchants only pay out for the last affiliate to refer a customer. Kirsty explains it well in her post here so I won’t bother repeating it.

Secondly, some people don’t like the idea of being tracked on the internet so they’ll set their browser to reject cookies or to delete them when they log off.

Third,  some merchants don’t set tracking cookies at all so you only get one chance at converting. Amazon, I believe, are notable for not setting cookies.

I like cookies and I’ll be paying closer attention in future to merchants’ cookie policies. It also backs up my idea that it’s better to concentrate on more niche products from smaller merchants as it’s more likely that the cookie-carrying visitor will return to the same site to complete their purchase.

I’ve been trying to be an affiliate tycoon with varying degrees of success for four months now so I thought I’d put together a list of some of the things I’ve learned so far.

1) Don’t follow the herd

If there’s one thing I keep hearing over and over again it’s “find a niche”. Affiliate marketing is getting crowded and more sophisticated. Steer clear of the big shiny commissions that gambling, mobile phones and loans offer. Many first time affiliates go down those roads and quickly get disheartened when they find their site at number 10 million on Google for “cheap mobile phones”. Find a niche for yourself when you’re starting out. There’s a lot to learn before you can try to take on the big boys.

2) Read blogs

There’s a wealth of knowledge out there on the net for free in the shape of successful affiliates’ blogs. Take advantage of their tips. Use a feed reader or aggregation service so you can check them all in one go. Try Affiliates4u blogs or internet marketing blogs for a quick start.

3) Don’t be seduced by big name merchants

It can be reassuring to see a well-known high street name in amongst the huge list of merchants some networks have. Brand recognition counts for a lot and it might make your affiliate links more attractive to your users but generally the big name merchants pay the lowest commissions. Also there are more affiliates promoting them so customers who are shopping around are more likely to pick up a competing affiliate’s cookie before they buy. Smaller merchants are likely to pay higher commission and to be more niche in their product offerings.

4) Blog

Writing your own blog helps to channel and focus your thoughts and helps you to build networking connections with other affiliates. Try to be honest and interesting and don’t use your blog as an excuse to push affiliate links - other affiliates will see straight through you. A good blog will attract inbound links which will help build Pagerank; you can then link out to your affiliate sites and pass on some of that Pagerank.

5) Keep a very tight grip on PPC

PPC advertising (Google Adwords etc) can be a great way of delivering targetted traffic to your sites but it can also burn through a silly amount of money very quickly. Make sure you set a daily spending limit you are happy to lose if it all goes wrong. Don’t just add every keyword in the world on day one. Focus on one product and keywords specific to it. See what works and build out from there.

6) Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

You will not get it right first time. You will make mistakes. Don’t let it get you down. That which does not destroy you makes you stronger.

7) Don’t expect anyone to understand what you are doing

Outside of affiliate marketing nobody will understand what you are spending your time doing. You can show them your sites and they still won’t understand. They’ll ask if it’s legal. They’ll ask if it’s like spamming. Most annoyingly they’ll ask you to show them how to do it cause it sounds like an easy way to make money. Come up with a stock answer to their questions which is suitably dull and vague that they’ll lose interest and leave you to get on with it.

8 ) Keep proper records

You might not think you’re earning enough to be bothered with proper records now but you need to get into the habit before it’s too late. You don’t need an accountant when you’re just starting out but make sure you keep copies of all invoices and receipts and keep a simple set of accounts in a spreadsheet or a package such as QuickBooks. Register with Inland Revenue as self-employed. Read the tips at High Royd Business Services

9) Learn how the different networks and link types work

Each affiliate network is different. They have different portfolios of merchants, different tools, different payment procedures and different levels of support. Take time to understand each one. Four months in and I’m still finding features I didn’t know existed. Even if you don’t understand what all the different link types and content units and so forth are now at least you will know that they exist so when you find a need for them you’ll know what to look for.

10) Don’t expect to make a million overnight

I can’t emphasize this one enough. It takes time to be successful at anything. You won’t make a fortune overnight. I thought I’d be able to quit the day job within six months when I started; now I’m thinking one year or more like two and only then if I work really hard and have more than a fair amount of luck. This is the toughest of my rules for me to stick with. I get really frustrated if I can’t do something the first time I try.

It can be done. But the odds are against you. You need to work hard to succeed.

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 been playing around with openads. It’s an incredibly powerful ad delivery platform which is open source and available for the princely sum of zero. The best feature for me though is the ability to target your ads depending on the geographic location of your site’s visitors.

Like most UK affiliates I’m primarily promoting UK merchants to UK customers. With PPC it’s easy to make sure that you’re only bringing in UK visitors but if your SEO is good enough or your content compelling enough you’ll soon have visitors from all over the world. These international visitors will most probably not be able to take advantage of the offers you’re promoting so you won’t be making any money from them.

I recently discovered that a long neglected site of mine was still getting a fair bit of traffic from organic search and that the majority of the visitors were US-based. I do use Adsense on the site which automatically handles showing the right ads to the right international visitors but I also have some image banner space and I wanted to target appropriate ads to those US visitors - they tend not to have much need for Sky TV in the States.

Openads is a PHP/MySQL solution. Installation is relatively straightforward with a wizard which steps you through setting up the database. If you’ve done a Wordpress installation you should probably be OK.

Once you’re logged in things can look a bit daunting. Openads is able to handle the ads for very large networks of sites and so there’s more features there than you need. Openads refers to each site as a publisher and each banner space within that site as a zone. I just set up one site and one zone within it to start with. You tell openads the size of each zone eg 468×60 so it knows which ads can fit in which space. You get a choice of “invocation codes” to paste into the appropriate place on your site as you would for Adsense or any other banner. The choice of code types is a bit confusing but I found IFRAME worked best on my sites.

On the other side of the equation you set up advertisers and the campaigns for each advertiser. I set up Amazon US as an advertiser and just created a default campaign. Then you add one or more banners within the campaign. Banners can be images, text or HTML. I pasted in the HTML that Amazon gave me.

You then assign banners to zones. As I only had one banner and one zone it was a simple case of linking the two together. If you’ve got multiple sites though there are loads of options and permutations for deciding which ads go on which sites.

After setting up a second advertiser of Amazon UK with a UK centric banner it was time do the geotargetting magic. This bit’s not very well documented. You need to download the free GeoLite Country database from Maxmind (get the binary format) and copy it into a directory on your website. Then in the openads geotargetting settings page enter the location of the data file in the ‘MaxMind GeoIP Country Database Location’ box. This should be the filesystem path eg /var/www/html/GeoIP.dat not a web address.

Finally I went back to my Amazon US banner and set a Delivery restriction by selecting ‘Geo - Country’ and picking the USA. Now my site is displaying an Amazon US banner to US visitors and an Amazon UK one to everyone else.

Now this may seem like a lot of work to achieve something relatively minor and you may wonder if its worth bothering given the appallingly low banner clickthrough rates. But openads is much more powerful than just a banner server. The ability to use HTML banners means you can effectively target any kind of content to visitors based on a number of criteria. For example, if you are building a postal mailing list you may wish only to show the sign up form to UK visitors. Or you might want to show adult offers late at night and family friendly ones during the day.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with openads. I’m sure I’ll find many more features as I play around with it some more. I also haven’t tried integrating it with this blog but I’ll have a go real soon now.

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.