Leaving The Day Job

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I must have missed this one being announced but it appears that MyBlogLog, purveyors of popular blog readership tracking/social networking widgets, has been acquired by Yahoo.

On trying to sign in this morning I found I needed to log in with a barely remembered Yahoo ID I set up a million years ago and merge in my MyBlogLog account. The only other difference I could see is that the site seems to be painfully slow.

Yahoo are certainly on an acquisition frenzy at the moment (they recently made a more high profile purchase of Zimbra) but I’m not quite sure what the strategic aim of this one is. Are they building a Google Analytics competitor? Adding more blogs to their search index? Or just burning through some cash for the fun of it?

Update: Seems this acquisition happened in January which is why I was unaware of it. I wasn’t even blogging then so hadn’t heard of MyBlogLog

OK. I admit it. I’m struggling.

I’ve never been the greatest at kicking my lazy arse into gear but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been finding it really difficult to motivate myself to “do the affiliate stuff”.

I started off thinking affiliate marketing would save me from the doldrums of the 9-5 but mixing full time work with evenings and weekends of affiliate stuff is doing my mental state no good. After eight hours of sitting in front of a PC coding the thought of spending a few more hours in front of a different PC is no fun. Particularly given the slim returns I’m seeing this month.

I was particularly interested in John’s post “Giving up the day job“. I was heartened by the fact that he had to spend a year as a part-time affiliate before he reached a level where he thought he could go full time.

But more to the point I was intrigued by the fact that his affiliate income soared when his full time job became part time and he was able to spend two full days a week on his affiliate work. That certainly resonated with me as I’m sure a full day’s affiliate work would be more productive than an equal number of hours slotted in after a day at the office. Unfortunately, I’m not really in a position to cut down my office hours yet.

So here’s the current plan. No affiliate work for the next 48 hours. Forget about it. Time off. Hope that my mate’s leaving do on Saturday night doesn’t take too much of a toll on me

And then : I’ll start taking some of my annual leave to give myself one or two days a week to fully concentrate on what I’m doing affiliate wise. Let’s see if I can get the same sort of benefit John saw when he went part time at work. With Christmas coming up hopefully I’ll be in a stronger financial position in the new year and can revisit the idea of part time working.

I mentioned Lee’s post earlier about weathering the storm should the economy take a downturn and I’m going to expand on my thoughts a bit here.

It’s sometimes easy to forget when we’re sitting at our computers setting up PPC campaigns, SEOing websites and blogging about it all that we’re part of a greater eco-system. Unless you live in a shack growing your own veg and knitting your own clothes you’re reliant on other people and indirectly you’re reliant on their success and their confidence in their own future success. If other people doubt their economic future they won’t spend money and we won’t get commissions on the sales.

Lee recommends reviewing the industries you target and mentions foreign travel as one which people are likely to cut back on. This is not good news for me as much of my affiliate income so far has come from foreign travel. I certainly think people are going to be cutting back on luxuries for the foreseeable future but at the moment I don’t think we need completely to run away from non-essential markets. After all, a foreign holiday can often be cheaper than one in the UK. Just think Easyjet rather than world cruises.

And that’s probably the crux of my advice (as much to myself as anyone). Don’t be swayed by what’s cool or what pays the best commission. Look for the good value deal. Think what you yourself would want to spend your hard earned cash on if you were uncertain about the future. Think as well about where people might want to save money. An example off the top of my head, people might decide to ditch their Sky TV subscription and switch to a Freeview box. They might cancel their mobile contract and switch to pay as you go. Just because people are spending more carefully doesn’t mean they’re not in the market for a new product.

Now is definitely a good time to take stock. Christmas is coming and that’s always the biggest spending time of the year but make sure you can survive in what may be a difficult new year.

A quick list of a few blog postings which caught my eye this morning. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to comment more fully on these later.

Keiron asks where are all the good UK blogs. Need to focus my mind on writing this one so I’ll be able to say “Here’s one, Keiron” before long.

Lee’s posted a great ten point plan on preparing your affiliate marketing strategy for the recession that may or may not be coming

Google’s Inside Adwords blog points out their new FAQ on low quality landing pages. Interestingly comparison shopping sites and travel aggregators are amongst those that risk low scores.

There’s a new traffic building strategy that sending the Blogosphere into overdrive this weekend and that’s BlogRush.

Long story short: you sign up, tell them about your site and then. you put a little Javascript widget on your site. Said widget displays links to other people’s blog postings in the same genre as your own. In return the widgets other bloggers put on their sites displays links back to your posts.

It all works on a credit system. Each time your page with the widget on is loaded you get one credit. Each time your feed is displayed on someone else’s site it costs you one credit. It’s also a pyramid scheme: you get credits each time someone you refer to BlogRush gets a credit themselves.

So, does it work? It’s far too early to tell. Certainly a lot of the big blogs that I read are signing up and promoting BlogRush. The pyramid nature of it means that the big blogs who sign up early and refer a lot of their readers will get the lion’s share of the ad impressions. The long tail may struggle to get any impressions.

The big question that I see hanging over BlogRush is how they’re going to handle spam. There’s a warning on the site not to sign up unless you have a genuine blog but how they are going to police this as the network grows I just don’t know. You’re also likely to see an increase in linkbait headlines as people try to convert their impressions into clicks. Not dissimilar to the title of this posting(!) - you could almost believe I’m learning something.

It’s a simple idea and it’s pretty well executed for a beta (although the signup page for some reason spits back a PHP array of my feed. When you get to this point just go back to the BlogRush homepage to get your widget code). Check back in a few days for a progress report.

The video below explains it all in more detail. Have a look then click here to sign up

Things have been very quiet on the affiliate marketing front. September is shaping up to be a pretty large disaster area in terms of commissions so I’ve been applying my brain to figuring out what the problem is. Now, my brain has come back with an answer and I’m entirely sure it’s correct if a bit depressing. The answer is that I’ve been doing bugger all.

That’s the truth. I’ve been so caught up in my experiments that I’ve not taken the time to apply my new knowledge. I’ve been sitting back waiting to see what my SEO, PPC and other acronyms have been up to. I’ve also, if I’m honest, been relaxing a bit too much with a short holiday and a boozy weekend away.

Some day I’ll get round to writing a blog posting about all the things I’ve learned in my short time as a semi-pro affiliate but, for the moment, it’s time for action. Tomorrow. Honest.

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle (great word) in the affiliate blogosphere (annoying word) over the past couple of days following David Hawk’s posting How The Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself. Now I’m not one to let a bandwagon pass me by without jumping on board so here’s my take it all.

My contribution to this debate is in relation to David’s first point : “merchants wised up to affiliate tricks”. I’m in the interesting position at the moment that I’m trying to develop a business as an affiliate in my spare time whilst working fulltime for a merchant which is just starting an affiliate scheme.

I’ve had my eyes opened quite a bit by the experience of being on the merchant side. Specifically we’ve had problems with coupon sites using IFRAMEs to drop cookies, affiliates using 302 redirects to effectively wrap our entire site content with their affiliate cookie in Google listings and PPC affiliates blatantly breaching our policies and bidding on our trademarks.

All of these techniques are nice little earners for the affiliates. They’re nice little earners for the networks too as they pick up their cut of all these transactions too. But they’re no use to the merchant. In fact, they are worse than useless, they are costing us money to get sales which we would already have received. As David’s article points out, coupon sites frequently do nothing to generate the sale but take a cut out of profits by getting to drop their cookie just before the customer buys.

So, is David right to say affiliate marketing is killing itself? I say no but it could start to feel pretty poorly pretty soon.

Certain affiliates and their sharp practices are dragging it down and it is down to the networks to get their act together and start policing their affiliates more efficiently. All the above breaches of terms and conditions were caught by us, the merchant. I appreciate that the networks can’t watch every merchant all the time but they are the ones who have access to the aggregate data. They are the ones who can datamine for unusual referral acctivity. They are the ones who can see referring urls that come from PPC campaigns when the merchant says no PPC.

At the moment the networks have little incentive to police their networks because their share of the pie is largely dependent on their affiliate share - it serves the network to have more revenue showing as affiliate generated even if it isn’t. But if this sort of cream skimming carries on both the merchants and the legitimate affiliates will lose faith in the system. I don’t think affiliate marketing is dying but it certainly needs to change because it’s in no-one’s long term interests for it to carry on like this.

Just got the following email from Microsoft AdCenter:

” We’re excited to announce the release of the Microsoft Content Ads Beta to all U.S. adCenter advertisers on August 29! With this release, you can extend your advertising reach beyond search, and choose how your accounts are upgraded. If you’re not ready for Content Ads at this time, fill out this web form by August 26 to upgrade in search-only mode. “

Two points. One I’m not in the US. Two, what the jiggery is the Content Ads Beta and if it’s a beta why do I have to opt out of it? Surely a beta is a test. You don’t just force everyone onto the beta programme. Or obviously, if you’re Microsoft, you do.

Quick update on my last post. As predicted by Yuri in the comments the site disappeared out of Google’s index within 24 hours. Much sullen grumpiness ensued at Chez Monty. Then over the weekend it’s back and better than ever. Not only is my site back at number one for the target key phrase but also for a second phrase I was targeting.

I suspect that what’s going on is somehow related to Google’s many data centres. Perhaps index updates are rolled out gradually across different data centres and you’ll get different results depending on which one you query. A similar effect, the so-called Google Dance, used to happen a year or two back when index updates were far less frequent than they are now.

I still don’t want to give the game away too much. The site is a bit time sensitive but hopefully this next week will give some idea as to whether my chosen niche and key phrases will actually bring in the traffic. Stay tuned for more from me and also keep an eye on Empress over at Building My Empire who’s going through a similar experience with her new site.

OK! I did it! Number one result on Google for my target key phrase in four days. Cool.

Here’s how it happened:

First up, register a new domain name containing the keyphrase, no punctuation, just the phrase all stuck together in one word. Total cost £6.09

Second, create the landing page. I used a CC licensed image from Flickr as a header but everything else on the page is pure text. The HTML is as simple as it could possibly be with a bit of CSS to make it look nice.

Make sure the page validates according to whatever Doctype you’ve specified. Valid pages are a whole lot easier for the search engines to parse.

Use Title and H1 tags. Put your key phrase in as the first words in both.

Write several paragraphs. Work your keyphrase in but make sure the text still reads sensibly to a human being. Don’t bother measuring keyword density just make it read like a halfway sensible short article and you should be fine.

When you’re happy with your landing page submit it through BlueHat SEO’s Quick Submit Tool. I have no idea how this works but I do know that Google indexed my site within a couple of hours of me using it.

Next, wait. It takes a while between being indexed and appearing in the rankings. Four days to a week seems about usual in my experience so far.

As they say on Slashdot, …. profit!

Now I appreciate that some people will read all this and say “well of course you can get the number one spot if your keyphrase is unusual enough” and that’s probably true but my point is that I did it quickly (thanks in no small part to BlueHat) and with a crappy single page website. If you’ve picked your keyphrase properly and are targetting a nichey enough market this should save you ever spending money on PPC ads.