Recap on 2011
I set myself 6 or so affiliate aims at the beginning of 2011. Sadly, or perhaps, stupidly, I didn’t achieve any of these. Were they unrealistic? Perhaps; maybe I should learn to walk before I can run. Did procrastination put pay to them? More than likely, yes. In hindsight, I should have just got on with it, rather than reading and learning about what I should be doing.

Looking forwards
It’s hard to stay focused when you aren’t ‘earning’ anything each month. I’ve had more success selling unwanted/unused items from around the house on eBay and Amazon than I have with affiliate marketing. Perhaps I need to stop looking for short term gains, and go after the long term income?

What are your plans for the future?

Check them out on my Domains for Sale page!

Do I; a) Go to the merchants site, find the product, find a large image of it, save the image to my pc for a bit of resizing then uploading to my site, write a description of it on my site, add prices, then create a deeplink for it manually, or b) Do the same, but work through a feed and add products from that perspective, or c) use an automated feed importer, and re-write content as I go…

What do YOU do?

Sadly, not a lot has happened in my affiliate journey since I went to Think Visibility in March. I came away having great plans, but none of them have come to fruition. I sit down with my laptop, or in front of the computer, and just procrastinate. On paper, I can come up with ideas – but when it actually comes to putting them into designs, I just hit a brick wall.

Designs are one of the hardest parts of the process for me to achieve, but I’m slowly starting to realise that design isn’t everything. Sure, it’s important, but it’s not the end of the world. I think that just getting out there and doing it is the key to success, NOT deliberating over the smallest details.

Thinking along those lines – I’ve tried hard to think of an affiliate site that has ‘failed’. I can’t think of one, other than ones where the affiliate simply hasn’t put it any work (content, or link building, or SEO). This then leads to the fact of build a site, add content (lots, good quality), and people will slowly start to visit it. Of course, the speed at which the visitors come, and the quality of traffic, and the conversions will all depend on the site. Even a poor site though should still make money.

Take for instance, a friends site that he has just listed for sale. It’s 2 1/2 years old – a niche gadget blog – and is earning £300 or a month. In essence, it is just a series of gadget posts, around 200-500 words per post – 5 times a week initially, and is now earning an income. Another friends site, a fashion ‘blog’ started life as a site just rewriting product descriptions and featuring products from net-a-porter, my-wardrobe, etc., and was earning a healthy 4 figure per month income within 2 years. It sounds simple…

Why do I struggle so much? Answers on a postcard please

My newest mini-affiliate site is an Anfield tours website, showcasing the different kinds of anfield tours that you can go on. Having outsourced the content, used a theme from Themeforest, and then put it all together, it’s finally been time to get it out into the real world. I’m a Liverpool fan (not a big one, but a fan nonetheless), so it’s a site that relates to something I enjoy, which is hopefully what is going to make a difference.

I’ve been trying to link-build, but ultimately so far it’s just resulted in being ignored (my last post explains this – perhaps?). I’ve had a couple of articles accepted by sites, so it’s just a wait and see game really. A friend has also suggested I could guest-post for his gift site, so that will be something I’ll need to look into.

Ultimately, the real reason for writing this post was to see if it would give Google’s indexing a kick up the bum! Time will tell!

Following some keyword research (or should I say, SERPS research!) I got thinking about the ‘money’ keywords, and how you’d know which ones are the ones you should be targeting. Sure, I might have a website about plastic tupperware, but how do I know what keywords I *should* be targeting with my content to the the right kinds of visitors? Ok, I understand that I won’t necessarily know until I’ve done a lot of testing, or have a lot of data to work with, but then how do I even begin to know what I should be targeting at in the first place? Logic would say target “plastic tupperware” initially, which is fine in a low-competition market… But in a market such as credit cards, or concert tickets, these initial keywords are very competitive and would require lots of work and money thrown at them to start seeing any results. So in short, how do I know what I should be targeting?

Secondly, being a software developer I like to make my life easy in the long run by automating everything that I can, and getting the computer to do the repetitive work. If I have an affiliate site with hundreds of products, such as different t-shirts, then updating these from a feed is straightforwards. If, on the other hand, I have a site in an atomic niche, such as cat scratching posts – what would be the best way to keep a small number of prices up to date? Using easy content units is one way, but it’s not necessarily the ‘neatest’. Using price tapestry is supposedly another, but is it flexible enough? Do I need to resort to scraping the merchants site myself, or scraping the datafeed?

And finally, approaching sites for links is a lot harder than it seems, especially when they don’t respond! I sent out over 2 dozen link requests this weekend, and have yet to hear back from any of them. Why, I wonder? Do I come across badly in my emails? Do internet people not work weekends?!? (can’t say I blame them given the lovely sunny weather we’ve had this weekend!)

Who knows! If you do, please let me know! Answers on a postcard (or in the comments would do nicely please.)

The UK’s newest SEO/Affiliate conference has just had it’s 5th outing, again at the Alea Casino in Leeds. I’ve been before, to Think Visibility 2, back in September 2009, and so I kind of knew what to expect, but also knew that there were surprises to look forwards to!

Pre-party!

Unfortunately I didn’t make it to the pre-party as I didn’t arrive in Leeds until after 11pm on the Friday night, but by the sounds of it there was a lot going on – especially the scalextrix  racing!

The conference sessions…

From the actual conference, I tried to attend the sessions that I thought were in areas that I lacked skills and knowledge, so I went to the ones focused on link-building mainly.

Session 1 – Paddy Moogan (Paddy’s Blog) – Links

The first session was by Paddy Moogan, and he focused on talking about links. Taking the form of a site clinic, he gave real-life examples of where the site owners should be getting links from. Of course, many of the ideas can be applied more generically to other sites.

One of the useful take-aways from the sessions was the use of various web tools to scrape twitter profiles for blogs to then contact the owners for links – especially as they are likely to be quite highly targeted. I didn’t know for example that Google Docs is fantastic for it’s scraping ability, with the ImportXML function! That certainly needs more investigation!

Paddy then went on to talk about some slightly shadier SEO, but unfortunately it can’t be repeated Very informative though!

Session 2 – Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Factory)- Mind Games

I’d never seen Stephen talk before, but in just the 45 minutes in which he was talking, it became apparent that the guy is so knowledgeable and passionate about the subject, and definitely an expert in his field. It was certainly eye opening session, and very thought provoking. For example, people are very irrational when they are competitive, and will do anything to get what they want. eBay is a great example of this, as people will get into bidding wars, often paying over the odds just because they want to win.

Session 3 – Paul Madden (Automica) – Outsourcing

This was a session that I was looking forwards to, but felt that it fell a little short of what I was expecting. Paul explained how he’d outsourced for a year and had a lot more freedom and free time, but needed to manage people a lot more. Outsourcing using oDesk, Rent-a-coder, 99designs, etc… all helped and meant that Paul could travel. I think the reason it fell short of my expectations though is because I was, in a way, expecting too much. There’s not too much that Paul could have talked about that I hadn’t already read online. Having said that, the biggest takeaway from the session was the crowdflower site! I’ve always wanted to try Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but obviously being UK based, I couldn’t. Crowdflower lets you do that from the UK, as they are an intermediary. Definitely one to try! Thanks Paul!

Session 4 – Dixon Jones – Majestic SEO Link Intelligence

Dixon presented a session on link acquisition and ensuring that you keep the links you acquire, rather than gaining them in the short term. Techniques such as press releases / news articles are good for links, but they aren’t sticky enough and it is something that needs to be repeated. However, using technology and social media to acquire links is very worthwhile – paper.li are great proof of this, having a link acquisition graph that nearly all sites would be proud to have, mainly using social media and engaging with people.

Ensuring that you keep your links is also a big factor. Again, xe.com/ucc have had a great link acquisition rate over the years, but are not keeping it up now, and a lot of the historical links are starting to be removed, so their total number of links is dropping.

The takeaways from this one were a couple of link-building tips.

Session 5 – Gary Taylor (Gary’s personal blog) – Domains

Gary’s session talked about whether it was better to buy a keyword domain and develop yourself, or buy an existing site and develop it further with the view to increase the income. Unfortunately, the outcome of the presentation wasn’t entirely conclusive. Of course, either option would work with a lot of time and money invested. For the purposes of the challenge that Dom threw to him (1 domain, 100 days, make a sale or flip the domain), Gary found that purchasing a site (rottweilers.co.uk) actually brought more money in from affiliate sales and adsense in a 1-week period than developing a basic site. Having said that, had he not had problems with 1&1 being, well, useless, the results may have been different!

Session 6 – Dave Naylor (Dave’s SEO blog) – SEO tips

Dave’s sessions are always packed full of little nuggets of information, and this session didn’t disappoint at all. Of course, many of the little tips are often common sense, but it’s always helpful to have them reinforced by hearing them from someone who knows what they are talking about!

The biggest takeaway for me from this was a little tip in that separating CSS and JS  calls out to separate domains or subdomains will speed up your page load speed. When a HTTP request is made, only a certain number are made to a single domain or subdomain at any one time.  By splitting out CSS/JS/Images to separate subdomains, you can make more requests at once, so the page loads quicker.

Also, page titles and meta descriptions are a lot more important than I thought, and something that should be set on a page – by – page basis, rather than being autogenerated.

Drink Visibility

During the day, and at the evening session it was finally good to be able to meet up with people that I’d only ever spoken to on twitter. Dan Harrison kindly introduced me to a few people whom I ended up having interesting chats with – Darren Singleton, Greg Findley, Paul Clarke, Mark Boyd, Dixon Jones, and Gary Taylor to name just a few! A few of the other guys there

Unsurprisingly, Al Carlton organised the poker tournament. I have to admit playing poker when sober isn’t something that I’m great at, and after a few drinks, when it is ‘free’ money, it is something that I’m even worse at. However, it seemed like a good idea, so I joined in. Playing against the legendary poker hustler Clarke Duncan (who didn’t even look at his cards throughout the game!) I eventually came up against him with a 4 and 6 in my hand. We both went all in, with Clarke taking the victory with just a high card! As Clarke ended up losing to the eventual winner George, I’m ‘technically’ taking 3rd place as I lost to Clarke! I know I was actually about 25th, but a ‘technical’ 3rd sounds better

Pick’n'Mix

Genius! Kudos to Dom and the team for providing a much needed sugar boost with the pick and mix! With a great selection from milkshakes to dolly mixtures there was something for everyone. Oh, and how could I forget the flying saucers! Delicious! Thanks guys

Other reviews

Becky Naylor has posted her review of Think Vis online now too – Why I Love Think Visibility

Andy Barr (10 Yetis) has posted some thoughts on Think Vis too, 10 Yetis Review of ThinkVisibility Conference 2011 in Leeds (I actually wanted to chat to Andy as I follow him on twitter but have never actually met him – putting faces to names is always good!)

Time to sell the site, domain, and move on?

Motivation is one of the biggest factors for me in affiliate marketing (and entrepreneurship in general), and finding it is something that I find difficult. Sure, the thoughts of earning enough money to buy my dream Ferrari 430 whilst working from home and getting time to enjoy life are very appealing (most of us want at least the freedom in life don’t we?), but getting there is another thing entirely.

Can’t see the wood for the trees

One of the biggest issues that I am finding is that without being able to see results, I find it hard to be motivated to continue working on a site, yet continuing until the first few sales roll in is what I should be doing. This is what I feel is one of the biggest stumbling blocks within affiliate marketing, not just for me, but for everyone who tries. Those who succeed make it past this, and those who fail, obviously never do.

Too many projects, too little time

Another issue that causes a lack of motivation, is actually having too many ideas. Everywhere you turn there are things that provide inspiration. Even seeing other affiliates being successful is an inspiration, and a source of ideas. Unfortunately though, as good as the ideas may seem, it is counter-intuitive and actually causes a lack of motivation by spreading myself too thin, and nothing gets done!

Distractions

Well, where can we start? Facebook, twitter, this site, reading other blogs… They’re all distractions that are stopping me from actually making headway with my site(s). But without them, I wouldn’t know what I do. Is that a good thing though?

Building motivation?

How can I build motivation? I’m really at the point now, where I should be earning a good income, but I just can’t get started. I think the biggest factor to building motivation would be to see some form of success. The sale of my most generic domain name recently motivated me, for a few days at least, but it soon died down again. I think I would have felt the same had I earnt just 10% of what I did, so it’s certiainly not a numbers thing.

How do you guys and girls cope with keeping yourself motivated?

Now, the VAT rate went up from 17.5% to 20% recently, and most companies have adopted the change in some manner or form, with most just changing their prices so that they reflect the new rate.

However, Sky seem to have taken it upon themselves to add a stealth price increase at the same time too. My usual Sky package is just £20 a month (@ 17.5% VAT), which as a net amount is £17.02. Understandably, with the VAT going up, you’d expect to pay more, so I was expecting to be billed £20.42, which is how my direct debit payment should have looked.

Sky however, have taken the VAT increase into their own hands. The exact wording on their website is.

UK VAT increase from 17.5% to 20% effective from 4th January 2011.

As a result, UK subscription prices will increase by approximately 2.5% - to keep pricing simple the prices on all UK TV Packages and some Products will be rounded up or down to the nearest 25p.

Ok, so Sky are trying to be helpful, or are appearing to be. It all sounds fine in that some will be rounded up, and some will be rounded down, so Sky should end up being no better or worse off, and neither should the tax man. It doesn’t seem to work like that though – every friend and relative that I have spoken to that has Sky have exactly the same rounding up issue, which means Sky are getting approximately an extra 8p per month, per subscriber. Not a lot, but cumulatively….

Sky have blurted on about the fact that they are nearing, or have passed, the 10 million subscriber mark in 2010. Assuming Sky are getting an extra 8p per month, per subscriber, that’s nearly an extra £10,000,000 a year. There may be actually some refunds in there too, where they have rounded down, but I feel that’s pretty unlikely based on the law of averages from asking around. Ten million quid. Wow. I’m sure the tax man will love that little bonus that Sky are going to pass on to him. I’m sure.

Contacting Sky

My first port of call was to contact Sky, through their online help system. I put in my query, and asked 2 questions. The first being, whether Sky would actually be passing on the extra 8p to HMRC, and then when would they be correcting my account so it was only £20.42, not £20.50.

Sky surprised (or rather, didn’t surprise) me, with their response which was a pure copy and paste of their website, and a single quote – “Whilst I realise that you may be disappointed with the decision made, I hope that you can appreciate our position on this matter.” What position? What matter? They seem to have just ignored anything that I asked!

So, another email in response sent back to Sky, asking them to re-read my initial email, and answer the damn questions!

2.5% is 2.5%, Right?

I checked my email this morning, after replying in the early evening yesterday, and found that Sky had just responded. Maybe they were getting their act together and giving me a proper answer?

Thank you for contacting Sky Help Centre.
Regarding your enquiry about the price increase ,this increase is due to the V.A.T rise . The increase of 2.5 % makes your subscription price £20.50 G.B.P ,from £20.00 G.B.P this equates to a subscription increase of 50 p .
I hope this helps with your enquiry
Kind regards

No, it doesn’t really help with my enquiry. All it says to me is that Sky are incapable of doing their accounts, and cannot work out that an increase of 2.5% in the VAT rate does not entitle them to increase the cost of their services by 2.5% as a result, without first giving me a 30-day notification of a price rise! Grr!

Where now?

Although the response from Sky is technically correct, as a 2.5% increase on top of £20 IS 50p, a 2.5% increase in the pre-VAT amount is actually only 42p.

The saga continues… Will Sky refund the 8p? Will HMRC care less? Tune in next week to find out more!