Leaving The Day Job

Top ten rules for new affiliates

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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.

MoFuse fixed. Free beta invites here.

Yesterday I reviewed three solutions for making your blog accessible from mobile devices. One of these was MoFuse and I highlighted a problem I’d had with my RSS feed being truncated. I’m pleased to say that MoFuse have got back to me today to say they’ve identified and fixed the problem.

You can view the MoFuse version of my site here and I’ve also got ten invites to join the beta program to give away. If you’d like to receive one just request it in the comments below and I’ll send by email.

Make Your Blog Mobile - MoFuse, Winksite and Wordpress Mobile reviewed

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

Geotarget and make money from international users

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.

A day in the life of a fulltime affiliate

Well, it’s going to be a long time until I can go fulltime as an affiliate but I took the day off from my “proper” job today to try to get a good chunk of affiliate work done. I started out the way I always imagined working from home would be like by sleeping through the alarm and getting up an hour and a half later than intended.

I moved on to reviewing stats, reading blogs and answering emails over a cup of freshly brewed coffee then settled down to have a long, bitter and swearword-infested fight with PHP and XML. I was trying to convert the XML from Amazon’s web service into a nice CSV file to use with Affilistore. I quickly learned that Amazon provide you with easily enough XML rope to hang yourself with. There’s far more data in their feed than I could ever need and so I spent ages trying just to figure out which bits of it were which. Then my rustiness with PHP paid me a visit and I spent a similar number of ages referring to the manual trying to work out how to manipulate said XML.

In the end I got something not entirely dissimilar to what I was trying to create but was not at all pleased that I’d wasted half the day trying to get it. It’s my intention to create a more general Amazon to CSV tool to put on this website but it’ll have to go sit on the backburner where so many of my other bright ideas are waiting. As much as I love Linux my years spent coding .NET at the day job mean development would be a heck of a lot quicker if I just bit the bullet and switched to hosting my sites on Windows.

By this point it was lunchtime already. In the day job, lunch usually marks the point at which my productivity takes a serious downturn but working at home I’ve actually got more done in the afternoon than the morning. This is a good sign as it kind of suggests that working for myself suits me.

I’ve discovered that one of my old, neglected sites is still seeing a fair bit of traffic and that most of it comes from the US. So I’ve installed openAds to rotate the banners on the site and geo-target them to the visitors. I’m thinking of revitalising and relaunching the whole site since people seem to still like visiting it.

I’ve also set up a PC at home with Fedora Linux so I can do development work, launched some PPC campaigns and done some tweaks to another one of my sites. All in all I feel I’ve been quite productive and I’ve certainly got more done in one day than I would have done in a week of just doing affiliate work in the evenings. Unfortunately you don’t get quick results in affiliate marketing (at least I don’t) so it’ll be a while before I see if my hard work pays off. In the meantime it’s back to the day job tomorrow - only four days until the weekend

Moving from Blogger Blogspot to Wordpress

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.

Caution: This blog is on the move

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

I’m the worst person in the world

I’m the worst person in the world.

OK, maybe I should qualify that before you think I’ve either murdered someone or have forgotten my mother’s birthday or I’m just having another one of my affiliate income-related downers. I mean, I’m the worst person in the world to try selling something to online.

Realising this has caused another huge revelation to, erm, reveal itself to me. As an affiliate I’ve been trying to market to myself. And that’s as dumb as rubber nails.

I’m cynical. I’m educated. I’ve got more years of internet experience than most people think it’s possible to have. I’m wise to affiliate marketing and to the spammy tactics of some of its dodgier disciples. I can use price comparison sites. I’ve bought all manner of stuff online and I’ll most likely go straight back to the retailers I’ve used before. In short, don’t bother trying to sell me stuff online.

In many internet businesses, producing what you yourself want can be a very successful strategy. It’s called scratching your itch. You want a better search engine so you go and build Google. You want to keep up with your Uni mates, you build Facebook.

But for me trying to sell things to myself is pointless. I’m not going to buy. So instead I sit in front of the computer all day dismissing all my ideas as naive or stupid or “been done before”.

Well, maybe Monty, not everyone in the world has been round the HTML block(quote) as many times as you. Maybe what you think is jaded is fresh and shiny to them. You may think that Myspace is Geocities with more Emo kids but to them its hip (or whatever young people say these days). Maybe you need to round up some net neophytes and see what happens when they surf the web.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about hoodwinking naive newbies with old hat spamming and deception. What I’m saying is that I need to be more openminded about what may work with the wider population outside of Geek Towers where I reside. I’m scientifically minded and I should experiment and discover what works. You never know I might surprise myself.

Wake me up when September ends

What a crappy month September is turning out to be. Not only have I got a year older, as I do every September, but my fledgling affiliate income stream has dried out and become a tiny trickle.

I’ve blogged before about the possible impending recession and certainly the going-ons at Northern Rock haven’t done the retail scene any good. But there seems to be more going on. People just aren’t spending.

Are they saving money now for a Christmas splurge? Or have they learnt in recent years that desperate retailers will start discounting heavily as we get closer to the big day?

Whatever it is it’s not making my life any easier facing my first Christmas as a semi-pro affiliate. It’s nigh on impossible to judge whether the work I’m putting in is worthwhile. I can’t tell whether customers are holding back their spending or if I’m just crap at building websites and attracting customers.

So what I’m doing is a scattergun approach. Throwing simple little websites together in a variety of different markets. Hoping that the SEO is good enough that they’ll rank nearer Christmas and bring in some sales for me.

Of course, there’s the danger of spreading myself too thin and making 100 crap sites instead of one or two good ones.

I think I need to be pragmatic and accept that the first Christmas as an affiliate is going to be a learning rather than an earning experience.

I’d still like to get a nice Christmas bonus for all my hard work though ….

A simple tip for affiliate networks

Dear Affiliate Networks

This is just a small request. Just a simple little thing which will make my life a lot easier. Please, please if you are going to give us Javascript snippets at least make sure they work!

I’ve just wasted an hour trying to debug the Javascript for a certain merchant’s search panel. Just to make it even more fun I’ve discovered in the process that the code refers to their Winter 2006 inventory so even when it works it doesn’t work!

Terrific.

All the best
Monty