Leaving The Day Job

RIP : Arthur C Clarke

It’s just been announced that the renowned sci-fi author Sir Arthur C Clarke has died at his home in Sri Lanka aged 90.

I have to admit that I’ve never read an Arthur C Clarke novel but there’s no doubting his influence on the sci fi genre and, although slightly less well-known, also on international communications. Sir Arthur is credited with inventing the concept of geostationary satellites which now enable worldwide communications in milliseconds. He came up with the idea that a satellite orbiting the Earth at a height 35786km above the surface would remain over the same point of the planet enabling it to be used to bounce signals from one part of the world to another. That orbit is now known as the Clarke orbit and that region of the Earth’s atmosphere as the Clarke belt. It was geostationary satellites that enabled us to watch live on TV so many of the events that shaped the world’s history in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Whilst best known as an author, Sir Arthur will also be remembered by people of my generation for his TV series Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World in which he investigated psychic phenomena.

Can you be an affiliate and be pro-privacy?

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.

SEO - Am I too dense?

I’ve been working on my bandwagon-jumping discount code site this evening. One of the main incentives for doing this kind of site is the opportunity to get a lot of traffic purely through organic search. PPC affiliates have long been banned from brand name bidding but there’s not a lot merchants can do to stop affiliates optimising for their brand name.

So I’ve been working on the usual kind of things : slapping the merchant name all over the page, giving “helpful” hints about how the visitor might have misspelt the brand name, sticking in various permutations of the brand name and various synonyms for “discount”.

Crossing the line

It’s all making me wonder whether I’ve crossed the line from optimisation into keyword stuffing. Let’s face it the distinction is fairly small. It’s kind of like the distinction between “tax avoidance” and “tax evasion” : one is a legitimate way of using the rules to your advantage; the other is advantageously ignoring the rules. Either way the aim is the same but it’s hard to put your finger on where the line is crossed.

So it is with search engine optimisation. Where do you stop legitimately optimising and where do you start stuffing keywords? I’ll assume that dodgy old tricks like white-on-white text are too obviously dumb to even warrant discussion.

Learning to read

One way to distinguish is to try reading your own copy as if you were a regular visitor to the site. Chances are that it’s going to sound a bit stilted with all your keywords shoe-horned in there but if it still makes sense and doesn’t scream out “I’m a shopping list of keywords” then you’re probably still on the right side of optimisation.

Another favoured technique is to use software to analyse the keyword density of your pages. This technique is particularly favoured by the producers of keyword analysis software!

Most serious SEO experts would caution against relying too heavily on this kind of software. After all, how do the people who make the software know precisely what the search engines are looking for? They can only use trial and error research the same as the rest of us. Search engine algorithms are being tweaked all the time. Trying to second guess which change on the page lead to which change in the rankings is pretty much guaranteed to introduce a large margin of error.

If a piece of software really was able to guarantee a rise in search engine position it would sell like hotcakes. Everyone would end up using the same techniques and any advantage would soon disappear as all your rivals will be producing almost identical pages to your own.

The way forward

Which leaves us with guesswork, patience and skill. In my quest to leave the day job I’ve thought that I could read up on everything I needed to know about affiliate marketing, apply it and be successful. I’m realising now that it’s not just knowledge that’s required but skill as well and skill is something you can’t be taught, you need to practice until you can do it without thinking. It’s depressing because there’s no short cut, no easy win, no get-rich-quick. But it’s inspiring too precisely because it’s tough - anything that’s worth doing is going to be hard work and the sense of satisfaction at succeeding is going to be all the greater.

Sunday Evening Catch Up

Things I’ve done this weekend:

• Upgraded my PC. Mostly I prefer working on my MacBook laptop but there are some things that are better done on a desktop Windows machine and mine was suffering under the strain. I’ve replaced the motherboard, CPU and memory to bring it into the 21st century and all for £120. It’s amazing how cheap and powerful PCs have become recently. Just need a new hard drive now to make the most of it. It’s getting towards the end of the tax year and so it makes sense to get these IT purchases in now to reduce my tax liability. Mental note to self: look up how to account for computer purchases on tax return - something to do with spreading it over several few years.
• Did some articles for my vibration platform site. It’s chugging along OK but only making a few quid a day off AdSense. I’m hoping the organic SEO visitors will start to increase as I write more content. Should look for link exchange partners too. Feel free to shout up if you have a relevant site.
• Worked on my discount code site. This is still in the early stages and will warrant a full post or two later. It’s Wordpress based but I’ve been getting my hands dirty doing some custom PHP and Javascript for some of the more idiosyncratic touches. It’s been a while since I did either PHP or Javascript and it shows. Pleased with how things are coming along though.
• Knocked together a quick and dirty Amazon Astore and an Adwords campaign to support it. Not convinced that this is going to get the ROI necessary to make it worth while but should find out over the next couple of days. It’s time sensitive so might post more later in the week.
• Went out for a few beers on Friday night with a good friend. It’s not all work, work, work; as they used to say in some stupid TV ad. It’s important to keep perspective when you’re trying to do fulltime and self-employed work.  Having an evening out did me the world of good. It’s been a while since I actually stepped away from the computer for an entire evening.

Seven days later

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-Peeling 

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…

(Not) Leaving The Day Job

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.

Subscribe to the RSS feed to follow the soap opera.

Spamming is like robbing a bank

The trouble with most get rich quick schemes is either that they don’t work or that they do work but are illegal. The fastest way to get a lot of money is to rob a bank. It’s also a good way to get yourself shot.

Here in our world of affiliate marketing the quickest way to get rich is to force your affiliate cookie on all and sundry and the fastest way to do that is to spam as many people as possible. Spam is everywhere. It must work, people must get rich doing it otherwise it would have stopped by now. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world. So why doesn’t anyone ever get hauled in front of a judge for it?

Over this weekend I’ve happened upon several spammed product feeds in Google’s product search (formerly known as Froogle). They’re just product feeds from major merchants (John Lewis for example) with the product URLs cloaked by bouncing through a redirect on a server in China. This is spamming pure and simple. It adds nothing to the product search, adds no value for the merchant yet makes a tidy profit for the spammer. It’s against Google’s terms and conditions and it’s against the affiliate networks terms and conditions. Yet people still do it. And why? Because it’s an easy way to get rich quick and no one is going to shoot you for it.

What penalties are likely to be imposed on these spammers that they can’t soon find a way around? Google can delete their product feed, ban their IP, block their email address from signing up again but any of these things can be easily defeated by the spammers. The affiliate networks can cancel their accounts but the spammers can sign up again with different details. What’s to stop the spammers? And equally why should legitimate affiliates be prevented from using such tactics if they think they can get away with it too?

As far as Google goes I would have thought they were perfectly capable of detecting these shady redirects in their product search. After all, they seem to have managed to clamp down on such practices in their standard web search. But what can merchants and affiliate networks do about it? I’m sure they have their methods for detecting spammers but my question is whether the window of opportunity is wide enough to make it worth the risk for the spammers. Can the affiliate networks catch the spammers before they can pocket their commission? If not, it’s a lucrative earner with no real work and no real risk.

Of course, wherever there’s an opportunity to make money there’s an opportunity for corruption. Wherever there is communication there is spam. But it’s incredibly frustrating to see other people getting away with it when you yourself are trying to play by the rules. On a related note, I’ve just done a Google search for “free bets” and there are Adwords ads showing up despite the fact that Google don’t allow gambling ads. Surely a company worth over $160b which is famous for it’s algorithms can find a way automatically to enforce their own rules on their own products…

I need a car on my blog

Why do so many of the “make money online” blogs have a flash car on the top their pages? You know 99% of them are faking it. Maybe John Chow’s got a real fancy motor, maybe Keiron has too but most of these folks are just making a couple of quid off Adsense a month. Maybe a bus pass doesn’t look so hot on your Wordpress header.

But I like to be part of the crowd so here you go, the Montymobile in all its glory:

Would you like some blogroll?

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

Internet on the move - not as good as it seems

I’m writing this sitting in the arts centre bar of my local university. I’m here to meet a friend but, being the geek that I am, I thought I’d get here a bit early and use the spare time to do some research online and a bit of content updating. I’ve got a fancy Macbook laptop and a fancy N95 mobile so it seemed like an easy enough thing to do. Instead, it turns out to be a right royal pain.

For starters, although I’m in great big wireless hotspot I’m unable to use the facilities because I’m not a student. Without the requisite username and password I can’t log on. My BT Openzone subscription which normally lets me roam on pretty much any hotspot service is useless here. With the uni blanketed with free wifi for the students and staff there’s no commercial incentive for any other operator to set up a service. Evidentally, it’s not worth the uni’s time to join the likes of The Cloud to allow us working folk to take advantage of the facility our taxes pay for either.

But never mind, I have a second option. Passing my local 3 store the other day I noticed that they have wireless broadband for £10 a month, available on a pay as you go, no contract basis - you just pay for the usb modem gadget. It looked good so I went in to investigate. Whilst in there I had a flash of inspiration remembering that my N95 could be used as a usb 3G modem. So I forked out all of £1.99 for a pay as you go SIM instead. Another £20 to Vodafone saw my N95 unlocked for use on other networks and I was off. Or I would have been if I could figure out how to top up the 3 account. I tried to use a cash machine to do it and discovered I could top up any mobile except 3. I tried to do it through the phone’s browser but was told I’d have to register my credit card 7 days before I wanted to use it. And then I discovered I didn’t have a signal on 3 anyway. So much for that plan.

I resorted to using my Vodafone sim card in the N95. I plugged the phone into my laptop’s usb port and tried to connect. My Mac informed me that my phone didn’t exist. No amount of shouting “It does exist, I can see it right here connected to you!” was going to make any difference.

Option 4: bluetooth connection, via Vodafone N95 to internet. Woo! I’m online! I’m restricted to the speed of a bluetooth connection, I’ve got to keep a close eye on my bandwidth usage and technically I’m breaching Vodafone’s T&Cs by using a computer on a service intended just for mobile browsers but at least I’m online.

Some how this isn’t the kind of ubiquitous wireless broadband that it always seems in the adverts. The ads show a guy with a laptop happily surfing the net wherever he pleases. In reality it seems I need a laptop, hotspot subscription, a couple of sim cards and mobile accounts in order to find at least one that provides 3G, a usb cable and one or more mobile phones. One day we’ll have something which “just works” until then I think I’m going to start carrying a good paperback around with me too - at least I know that will work anywhere and keep me entertained when waiting around for people.