If you didn’t know already I am a Geordie, so the launch of MTV’s Geordie Shore had me both intrigued and fearful of the mockery they would make of a very proud City.  It also set off alarm bells in the internet marketer in me that there was an opportunity to be made with this so I followed my own advice of planning for an emerging market and decided to setup www.geordieshore.org.uk.

MTV: Creators of Geordie Shore

The Plan

Geordie Shore was to be launched on the 24th May 2011 and was announced around late April 2011 by MTV.  It was around this time that I bought the best TLD that was available in what I believe to be the order of priority for exact match domain names.

There were to be 6 episodes aired once every week so I had a timeframe of 1 month to set the site up and generate authority and 6 weeks to monetise the website.

Setting Up The Domain

On the 27th April 2011, I setup a simple WordPress installation with my preferred plug-ins and ensured that I had a fully working, professional looking website within a few hours that was optimised for several core terms I envisaged would generate traffic ahead of a TV launch:

• “Geordie Shore News”
•  “Geordie Shore House”
• “Geordie Shore Cast”
• “Geordie Shore Trailer”
• Etc

Because of the vanity nature of the program, I created individual cast member pages and a photo gallery page.  Aside from those, the rest of the site was to be driven by News articles.

Setting up simple things such as Google Alerts for announcements in high authority publications allowed me to quickly research, write and post articles that were of interest to users to place on the website as well as adding images to a gallery that I configured with the help of Alex Moss.

And that was it – I was set to be reactive and watch the traffic come pouring in. I just needed to drive some interest and rankings!

The Geordie Shore Fan Site Facebook Fan Page

Promotion

I setup a Facebook Fan group and a Twitter account to help promote each article that was published as well as calling in favours from friends to retweet/repost wherever they felt the need.

Due to the nature of the Exact Match Domain and the very low competitiveness of the searches I started ranking instantly for a lot of short/mid/long keyphrases.  I never built a single link to the website – I let these modes of promotion help initial traffic.

The Stats: Pre-Launch

The first episode for Geordie Shore was due to air on the 24th May 2011 and I had been working hard on populating the website and ensuring internal linking and anchor text was as optimised as possible.

I had also been posting several custom made news posts to provide stories that would be of interest to potential fans of the shows – all of course promoted via Facebook and Twitter.

Rankings

On the 21st of May 2011 – the weekend before the first episode aired, I had achieved several high rankings. These were amongst MTV’s official website for Geordie Shore as well as tabloid press websites.

Pre-Launch Traffic

Traffic

From the 27th April 2011 to 25th May 2011 (a day after the first episode aired), the Geordie Shore website received over 12,233 visits through all mediums, with a total of 933 different keyphrases via Organic:

The Stats: The Series

The series ran for a total of six weeks, airing every Tuesday night at 10pm.  Once the initial interest for the series had died down, traffic did drop considerably, only spike on or around show times.  This was, I thought, a little surprising, but none the less the website was generating traffic and interest from users.

Rankings

By the end of the series the competition had stepped up massively in terms of newspaper interest and celebrity magazine articles appearing in the SERPs.  This however, did not overly affect my target rankings.

Series Traffic

Traffic

During the time span of the entire series (24th May – 28th June 2011), the website had attracted 50,282 visitors through all mediums, with a total of 3,799 individual keyphrases via Organic.

The Stats: The Aftermath

As you can imagine, once the series died down, the traffic began to dip heavily. Interest in the series began to dissipate along with interest in the cast despite two bonus episodes being aired in August.

Rankings

The rankings had time to really come to fruition and it’s fair to say that it is the perfect base for the upcoming 2nd series that is due to start in 2012.  Currently, the rankings are:

The Aftermath Traffic

Traffic

Since the end of the series, traffic has fallen considerabley (as expected); during the time period of 28th Jun 2011 to the 25th October 2011 the website had attracted 52,357 visitors through all mediums, with a total of 5,128 individual keyphrases via Organic:

Monetisation

As you can expect, maintaining a fan website like this was not much work. I spent around 10 hours on this website in total.

During the entire time that the website was live, I had chosen to monetise the website with good ole Google AdSense.  Whilst it’s not the best advertising network of choice, it is by far the easiest and most user friendly to implement.

One of the biggest things that people who setup AdSense do not do is create a specific Ad Unit and assign it to a channel.  The benefits of doing this allow you to see which advert area performs the best over a period of time and whether moving the ad unit to a better position may be more beneficial to you as a website.

AdSense Placement and Positioning

Positioning

Following the advice of Google on how best to position Google AdSense, I placed several adverts around the site in prominent positions.

The purpose of this positioning was to ensure that the adverts were well above the fold of any user visiting the website and were in such prominent positions that a user could easily identify them and visit the websites if the adverts were of interest to them.  Remember, don’t covertly blend your adverts, entice the user to click the advert or other tricks that may jeopardise your AdSense account.

Summary

• Over the course of a 6 month period, I drove over 112,000 visitors to the website through various marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Organic search mediums including Google Image Search.  Small compared to other sites, but a decent return on time investment.
• Average Page views per visit were around 3.03%, helping serve over 790,000 adverts throughout the website. The average bounce rate was around 53% due to the high vanity elements involved through the website.
• The most popular page on the website was the Geordie Shore Nuts Magazine Photoshoot page.  This received over 71,000 pages views equating to 21% of the websites total page views.
• Facebook received over 300 fans, despite being a fan website.

What Would I Do Differently?

Looking back over the campaign, I wish I had spent more time on it during the six week period the show was on.  I watched the show and, unfortunately, I was not a fan once I watched the first episode – this made me lose passion in the project.

Ideas for growth would have been:

• Episode reviews. These would be written the very same night along with targeted distribution to take advantage of easy rankings and QDF signals.
• In depth biographies
• Targeted affiliate campaigns. My idea was to have a permanent Sky TV affiliate advert present to promote Sky TV since Geordie Shore was only viewable on MTV – a Sky only channel at the time. (Sky actually refused my request to join their program as I did not match their brand criteria).
• A much stronger link building campaign.  Due to little-to-no budget, I was limited in avenues, but blogger outreach and article distribution
• Paid Advertising. Possibly through the AdWords or FacebookAds could have yielded better results. I do think the website was not strong enough for that kind of investment
• Google News syndication.  I had toyed with the idea of guest writers – people who had more passion for the show. Again, this was limited due to budget.

I hope this gives you an insight into how to quickly set up a reactive website, plan a strategy and to monetise the website. All you need is to act upon the ideas that we all have when we see something announced – don’t leave it to someone else!

** UPDATE **

Due to clause 8.1 of the Terms Of Service for Google AdSense, I have removed all facts and figures of my CTR for AdSense. Apologies, but I kind of like my AdSense account.

With the start of the English Premier League now behind us the race has been on to capture sign ups to fantasy football leagues by many organisations including Sky Sports, The Sun and the official fantasy football of the Premier League.

I’ve been using the official Premier League for over 4 years now (with over 2 million other players) and during my usual recycling of passwords I was unable to access my account and I have had to request a new password. I’ve been unable to receive these despite direct emails to their support group and countless retries. During this time I was trying to find ways to at least access my team so I could create a new team and I discovered a flaw in the recent redesign of the Premier Leagues Fantasy Football website – a redesign that didn’t exactly go off without a hitch!.

Access Users Real Names

As part of the sign up process you are asked to create a team name and join leagues that are organised by companies, organisations and friends alike. When you join a league you allow your name to be seen by others in that league. Unfortunately you are able to see the names of other users of PremierLeague.com in other leagues – even without an account!

An example of a Fantasy Football league showing real names of users

By following a specific URL (e.g. http://fantasy.premierleague.com/my-leagues/474803/standings/) you can access any league currently setup on PremierLeague.com and gain access to the personal names by changing the league ID.

The PremierLeague.com’s privacy policy (which you cannot link to on their new website strangely enough) states:

8. Any personal information which you submit will be controlled in accordance with The Premier League’s privacy policy and all UK legislation governing the same. For the avoidance of doubt, we will not disclose your personal information to any other Player unless a) this is restricted to those details in clause 19-20, or b) if we are required to do so by a competent authority or court within the United Kingdom.

Despite the above clause you can quite clearly gain access to personal information.

19. The winners’ names will be published on the Site by the 28th day of the month following the month in respect of which the Monthly Prize is awarded in respect of winners of Monthly Prizes and by Friday 22nd June 2012 in respect of the winner of the Winner’s Prize; or alternatively winner’s names can be obtained by sending a stamped self-addressed envelope to Fantasy Premier League, The Premier League, 30 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8PL.

20. Subject always to terms 30-34 below, Players’ names and addresses and the winners’ photographic images and their comments relating to any Prize may be used without limitation for future promotional, marketing and publicity purposes of The Premier League in any and all media worldwide without notice to them and without any fee being paid.

It’s not a full-blown privacy leak, but when coupled with the team names of certain users, it could be embarrassing given the questionable nature of some of the team names involved.

** UPDATE **  The source of this is not a glitch, nor an error on Googles behalf; it is in fact my error.  The cause of this is a result of Adblock Plus.  Why did it block the titles?  It blocks anything with the URL https://adwords.google.co as per the screenshot below:

Adblock Plus block Google Keyword Tool

Just a quick post from me this evening, but carrying out a search for Keyword Tool in Google resulted in the following SERP being delivered

Google SERP Result - UX Error

As you can see, the listing headers have disappeared and this is making the results unclickable.

This is a pretty big UX breakdown in my opinion as there is physically no other way I can get to those top two results other than to:

• Copy and paste the URL. This would, however, be hard to do with a longer URL (such as Malcolm Coles result).
• Navigate using the keyboard by taking advantage of Google Accessible View.

Imagine if this happenned to a clients website – the potential loss to traffic and visitors is very much up for debate.

Is this a glitch? I still get the result regardless of what browser or platform I use.

Recruitment Agencies: Superheroes Apply Within

Every sector has specialisms; web development is no different.  Unfortunately, many recruitment agencies have yet to grasp the difference between web development and web marketing.

I regularly get job opportunities throughout the UK, and I ignore the majority.  Why? Firstly, I am very, very happy at my current employer. Secondly, the majority of job offers are completely misguided, insulting and would require super human feats of skill – all for a drop in wages; The reason? Recruitment agencies still not getting the difference!

Here is an excerpt from a recent job offering I received at the opposite end of the country to me. A job offering, might I add, from a recruitment company that I have never spoken to:

seeking 3 X Front end developers ((X)HTML, CSS, Jquery) on an initial 3 months contract for an ever growing company in xxxxxxxx, London.

The successful Front end developer(s) ((X)HTML, CSS, Jquery) will be building/creating web pages in (X)HTML, CSS and Jquery from Photoshop files.

Essential key skills / experience:

• Strong knowledge of (X)HTML, CSS, JQuery
• W3C Web Standards
• Experience in creating public facing sites on multiple browsers
• Experience in UI design skills would be an advantage
• Experience in Photoshop, Adobe suit, etc. Would be an advantage
• SEO and PPC would be an advantage

Did you spot the super human part of the job they requested?  Yep, “SEO and PPC would be an advantage”

An Increasing Problem

I am seeing more and more of this being slid in to job offers. Is it a case of buzzword bingo or are they actually looking for someone with proficient skills in SEO and PPC and if so, what part of the implementation stage are they looking for? Are they looking for someone who is proficient in creating SEO friendly web applications and websites, someone with experience of creating PPC landing pages or are they looking for someone to manage an SEO campaign or PPC campaign?

I know a lot of web developers who are fluent in the art of SEO and/or PPC but the majority will admit that they don’t get too involved – they simply ensure their designs and solutions do not hinder SEO efforts. They most certainly don’t co-ordinate and optimise entire websites as they build them.  People who work solely as an SEO or PPC marketer know that these are two very different animals.

I admit that recruitment agencies have a tough job. They often have to make a turd sound like the next best thing since sliced bread. However, that’s about as far as my defence of recruitment agencies go.  I’ve been on both sides of the table when it comes to job interviews and there is nothing more disheartening than being fed a lie by the recruiter about a position/candidate.  That’s why I know the ones I trust and the ones I don’t.

In my eyes, search engine optimisation is a skill that can be complimented heavily by experience in web development.  It’s the avenue I took when I first started out as an SEO and it has come in handy when liaising with web developers.  However, they are simply two different disciplines and unless you are an in-house web developer working within a team I honestly hope you are superhero as you will burn out – and fast!

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/niallkennedy/523823960/)

With the ability to share our pictures to the internet in an instant via Twitter, Facebook etc through services such as Flickr, YFrog and Twitpic, it’s of no surprise that people are sharing their experiences of live music and events.

With the start of summer solstice came the Glastonbury festival. To most people who attend Glastonbury that means mud, music and more mud. Naturally people want to share their experiences online and a service called GlastoBuzz was set up to allow people attending Glastonbury to be able to do just this – Only they decided to do it through an unmoderated API call.

How GlastoBuzz works

They searched twitter for any mention of #glasto and any URL that was posted that came from Yfrog.com or Twitpic.com.  These images were then replicated on their gallery page without any moderation resulting in the following test showing up:

GlastoBuzz - An Unmoderated Twitter Feed

This shows the dangers of unmoderated feeds where the public have the ability to input messages directly.  GlastoBuzz should probably fix this quickly.

With the recent Panda update, the usual scaremongering has reared its ugly head along with the “gurus” overusing the term to appear knowledgeable and “down with the kidz” in business circles; Implemented to remove websites that returned low quality content – either via User Generated Content (UGC), duplicate content etc – the Panda update cleaned up a lot of search results where UGC websites dominated. However, several website have been caught up in the algorithmic change and are already experiencing a drop in exposure.

Whilst the majority of websites that were affected on the day of roll out in the UK are big, national websites, the potential for some websites to be hit with panda penalisation is still very real.  Simple problems caused by the bad practises of their website developers and/or their SEO’s can create a myriad of headaches which result in “false positives” when under the panda spotlight.

To combat panda penalisation, there are a few things you can do to tighten up your website to ensure you aren’t giving off any false signals.

Monitor Indexation

One problem that is regularly encountered when monitoring fluctuation in rankings is duplicate content.  Google, quite literally, gets confused with your website and will change the pages that it decides to rank for specific phrases when basing the decision solely on on page content. This regularly happens with freshly launched domains or website migrations.

Checking Indexation using RankTracker

The causes for this can be down to a simple thing such as Google indexing a printer-friendly version of your page or something more extreme such as capitalisation in URL’s which both return a 200 (OK) server response code. The solution?

Canonical Link Element

With the introduction of the “Canonical Tag” (as it is often referred to) it is now much easier to control duplicate content on your website.  An example canonical tag would look like:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.kevstrong.com/search-engine-optimisation/change-domains-and-retain-your-pagerank-in-under-2-hours/"/>

This ensures that you can serve pages as they would be shown on the website whilst telling the search engines which page to index and attribute authority to – all without impacting on the user experience.

Check For Duplicate Mark Up

As an SEO you should ensure you’re doing your upmost to make every page of your website unique and relevant to the content on that specific page. Avoiding duplicate mark up should be at the top of your on page priority list and regular checks will help you tighten up your website.

There are two ways to do this – both free.

Search Engines

Use the site: operator in Google to easily spot duplicate Title/Description tags.

Use Site: in Google

Spider Tool

Use a spider tool to analyse the on-page tags and elements of your pages.  I personally love Screaming Frog for this as it will also show you canonical tags for those pages and will easily export to Excel for further analysis.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Redirect All URL’s To One Core Domain

With multi-lingual serving aside, your domains can be causing you complications. Sometimes your website can serve up different versions of your URL thus creating full-site-duplication. Had this been a problem with this blog, http://kevstrong.com would be classed as a different website to http://www.kevstrong.com for example.

If you have not already implemented canonicals on your website, Installing a simple site-wide 301 redirect solves this problem

Also ensure that any other URL’s you have serving up your websites (hyphenated etc), are re-directed using a 301 (permanent) redirect to ensure only one version of your site exists in the search index.

Change Your Product Descriptions

When dealing with large online retailers it is hard to create thousands of pages of content for products. However, one problem that many websites bring on themselves is the implementation of content provided by the product manufacturers – the same information supplied to thousands of other websites. This is the prime reason several affiliate websites and coupon websites took a big hit in the panda update.

Write unique descriptions for the products as much as possible (100% if you have the manpower), and be creative with the specifications (height, width, dimensions).

Use Javascript When Serving UGC or Web Applets

You could choose to serve elements of your website that are generated by users (such as comments) or plugins that are implemented throughout your site using Javascript. This ensures that you cannot be maliciously targeted for duplicate content by spammers (although the likelihood of this being a base for penalisation is slim-to-none) or penalised for showing the same content on every page.  A side benefit to this would be increasing site speed. (A good example of this is thesun.co.uk).

Thesun.co.uk with JavaScript disabled/enabled UGC

Obviously there are elements outside of your control when it comes to the panda update, but if you keep your own house in order then you are at least controlling what you can.

Earlier this week^* I saw a new addition to Googles SERP’s in the form of “Best Guess”.

When conducting a search where there is ambiguity in the results, it would appear that Google is best guessing the result.  It appears to be doing so based on citations and references from high authority websites that are trusted within its index (e.g. Wikipedia, Yahoo etc).

Google Best Guess: Bury County

Overall, this appears to work fine, but every so often it does appear to slip up:

Google Best Guess: Newcastle Upon Tyne Which County

Whether this is the fault of Google or the “authority” websites that it references is up for debate, but the last time I checked Newcastle upon Tyne was not in Northumberland but in fact in Tyne & Wear.

What does this mean for users of the search engine? It’s a further addition to the solutions that are offered by Google when users are searching for an answer; other examples include:

Google: What Time Is It In New York

Google: Exchange Rate GBP to Euro

Google: Suicide

More importantly, what does this mean for SEO’s that are targeting ambiguous keyphrases? That remains to be seen.

^* Thanks to Peter Stranney from Mediaworks for introducing me to this.

As an SEO, moving a domain name comes with a certain degree of fear. Search engine rankings can drop, site authority can be lost and traffic can plummet if you don’t tie up the move perfectly.

Almost a year after its reincarnation, I decided to move my domain name from www.goosh.co.uk over to www.kevstrong.com.  Why? I had finally secured the twitter username I had been chasing for almost two years – @KevStrong (another post is coming on how I achieved this).

In doing this I wanted to ensure I retained all of my inbound links, all of my traffic and, ultimately, all of my website authority; I never expected my TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) to update after 2 hours.

Redirection Background

When moving a domain you have to ensure that all of your existing URLs resolve correctly upon completion. Several problems can arise during this transition due to a number of reasons, of which these can include:

• Change in page names
• Change in coding languages (.aspx to .php)

To ensure the search engines and users alike are redirected, I recommend using a 301 server redirect which sends them to the new URL and, in the case of the search engines, pass all authority to the new destination you have specified.

How I retained My Toolbar PageRank

After I had installed a new version of the website, design etc and imported all content onto the new domain I had to ensure the move was seamless.  To do this, I prepared the following checklist to ensure I didn’t miss anything whilst moving over:

• Update all internal links
• Gather a list of all active & indexed URLs
• Create 301 redirection rules
• Verify domains with Google Webmaster Tools
• Upload new XML Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools
• Initiate a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools

Update all in internal links

With nearly 60 pages of content all interlinked as part of my onsite optimisation I had to ensure that all links were updated so they passed full authority directly and not through a 301 (where a small amount of authority attrition can occur).

This would have been easier to do had I used absolute path interlinking ( href=”/path/” ) as opposed to domain interlinking ( href=”http://” ) but I chose domain interlinking to ensure I receive link backs to my content should it get scraped (as often happens in the SEO niche) and the domain name not replaced.

Gather a list of all active & indexed URLs

Getting a list of indexed URLs is easy and acts as a priority list for you should you have a large number of indexed content.  This is achieved using the site: operator in Google.

Create 301 redirection rules

In the case of moving my website to a new domain it was a simple mirror image of my website on the new domain name so I didn’t have much complication. As I am hosted on a Unix Apache server this was achieved with a flat URI remapping in my .htaccess file. E.g.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.kevstrong.com/$1 [R=301,L]


Had this not been the case and I was moving to page names, server languages this could have got much more extensive and complicated.  In this case I recommend the creation of an excel document with the following layout to ensure you map a concise list of rules to pass to your website developer to follow:

Google Webmaster Tools: Verify your domain name

This is essential for making the transition as seamless as possible.  Access Google Webmaster Tools and “claim” both of your domain names if you have not already done so.

I highly recommend using the “Upload HTML Verification file” where possible as this not only reduces code bloat on your website, but it also hides your META verification number from prying eyes.

Google Webmaster Tools: HTML Verification

Also, Google are kind enough to let you upload one file once your 301 redirect rules are in place.

Google Webmaster Tools: Upload new XML Sitemaps

Creating a sitemap.xml file and submitting it to GWT ensures you are letting Google know of all URLs that you have on your site.  When used with a brand new domain I have seen new sites indexed in less than 10 minutes using this sitemap submission service.

Google Webmaster Tools: Sitemap Submission

Google Webmaster Tools: Change of Address

Google allow you to notify them of a change of address (much like moving house) and I can only assume that requesting this change directly via two verified accounts gives Google the upmost authority it can get to move everything to the new domain name.

Google Webmaster Tools: Change Of Address

This appears to be the Holy Grail when it came to retaining my TBPR so quickly (remember: 2 hours).

Further Tests

I would like to test this in the future to see if it:

• Was a fluke.
• Can be manipulated to receive an artificial TBPR update on a new domain (and then off I trot to DP to sell to the people who put a price on such inferior things).
• Can be reversed just as easily.

Closing Notes

This is, without doubt, the cleanest domain redirection I have ever completed. Most are much more complicated and require much more work. However, with this exercise I have noticed several things:

Content is indexed twice

I doubt this will count as duplicate content as Google is aware of the redirection in place, but it’s good to dominate the SERPs for a little while whilst it serves up dual-index pages:

Google SERP Result: Kev Strong

Google Webmaster Tools does not update your Sitemap count immediately

Despite being able to find my new domain in the search index, GWT does not show any content indexed:

Sitemap XML Indexation

Toolbar PageRank does not update for internal pages

Interestingly Google seems to have only updated the homepage TBPR and none of the inner pages.

I hope this helps throw some insight into moving a domain name with the minimum of downtime to your rankings, authority and traffic and how you can really get the search engines to do the work for you.

Building a website is pretty simple when you know how. Monetising a website through advertising platforms is also fairly simple once you look in the right direction. However, creating a website based purely around affiliate content was something I had never done and thought would be a challenge.

Here is how I created an affiliate website (http://www.mensdeodorant.net/) in a little less than two days following these simple steps.

Choose A Niche

I would advise looking at something that is of personal interest to you as it makes you more inclined to create the website. Using knowledge that you already have, you will be ale to make decisions on targeting, content and execution a little easier.

Investigate Search Volumes

Once you have identified a niche you want to work in, look at the potential search volume for it.  Ultimately, this has to be something that people will buy online for you to make money, but you can also make a side-return on your investment through advertising placed on your website.

Check Domain Name Availability

It’s in common agreement that exact match domains still wield significant power in the search engines – particularly Google. You can use this to your advantage. If you have identified a niche, check to see if the exact match domain name is available.

Create Affiliate Accounts

This was the part that perplexed me the most as it seemed complicated and time consuming. Most online stores run their affiliate program through an affiliate network as opposed to direct. There are several affiliate networks out there including Commission Junction, Paid On Results, Web Gains and Affiliate Window. I would recommend signing up for all of these networks, particularly if you are offering something that is commonly available as it will allow you to offer more products on your affiliate website.

Apply To Join Relevant Merchants

Once your accounts have been approved, I would once again recommend joining merchants that offer your products. In my case it was deodorant for men, so I applied to join most of the pharmacy & health beauty merchants. Take note of which accounts you are accepted into and which ones you are rejected from as you don’t want to be sending traffic and sales to a website you won’t be receiving commission for!

Join Easy Content Units

This is what I refer to as the “secret sauce” for me. Easy Content Units saved me so much time it’s unfathomable as to where I would be without it.

Easy Content Units offers you the ability to create a “customisable unit” that you can populate with products from a variety of merchants & affiliate providers. This can then be customised in terms of looks, colour and style through CSS and then output through a single-line Javascript code snippet for you to insert into your relevant pages.

Don’t be fooled, it’s not as simple as one-click setup – you still have to do some work, however it minimises the workload for you a lot. I will be writing a post in the future detailing my ECU process in much more detail to help you speed this step up.

Creating Your Affiliate Website

I decided to run my first website on the WordPress platform with a premium theme based on the fact I had little-to-no time to create my own platform. I didn’t require a website with a payment gateway, nor did I need a UGC/review system in place.

I scoured several premium WordPress websites including Theme Forest, Templatic and more. In my case I decided on a Templatic theme that allowed me to show categories and products in a respectable manner.

Whilst ECU offers a fantastically easy WordPress plugin, I decided to paste the code into each page directly to ensure I was doing it correctly. If you are building a site with several products, I would recommend the ECU plugin.

Standard Site Launch

Once you have your site ready to launch, I would recommend carrying out several simple SEO practises to ensure your website is at least found. This will of course differ on the platform your website is built on, but I always carry out the following when launching a new website:

• Verification & XML Sitemap submission to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
  Simply to tell the SE’s what pages you have available.
• Tweet mentions through accounts with active followers.
  I have witnessed phenomenal website indexation through this.
• Generic & niche directory submissions.
  These still work and form a good base for your website and are great for easy one-way links to your website.

Of course there are many, many ways to promote your new affiliate website including blog articles, press releases, PPC advertising etc. It all depends on your spend.

Lastly, good luck if you decide to take the plunge and remember – you don’t know till you try.

If you need any help or advice, feel free to contact me or comment below.

As a form of disclaimer before I fly into this post, I have to admit that I worked for 24 Help, a supplier of offsite, white-label customer support to brands such as Sony Erricsson, Xbox UK, Norton and 1&1.  I worked, specifically, on the 1and 1 contract and even visited their head UK office in Slough to liaise with “2nd level support”.  However, this post is regarding their offerings and service – not them as an employer (which they were in an indirect way).

I have dealt with 1and several times in a professional capacity with regards to web development and hosting. Whilst their packages and services are competitive, they rely heavily on their advertising in every tech magazine you can think of with expensive 2-6 page spreads about how they are “Europes #1 Web Host”. Little do they tell you, they are also Europes #1 Hated Webhost.

Hate, for me, is a very strong word. It is a word reserved for sheer contempt towards someone or something. It usually boils over into unbridled anger and – in some cases- violence.  However, having experienced 1st line technical support as a customer, I can see why they are hated. IN fairness to them, a lot of their complaints arise through people misunderstanding their service – the usual “non-savvy” customers. However, there are many people I have spoken to who hate them for a variety of reasons:

Customer Service

This is the single most complained reason regarding 1and1 when I have spoken to people. It comes down to one thing: the lack of it.

Most responses are spoonfed from a guidebook of palmoffs and there is little to no attempt to actually resolve the issue at hand. Whenever I have spoke to customer service operatives via the telephone they are often illtrained, non-technical and unable to deal with the simple queries a web hosting provider should get including such gleaming responses as “What is an FTP?”, “DNS takes 7 days to resolve” and “We don’t support PHP on our dedicated servers”. (I shit you not at these responses).

In fact, the lack of customer service has annoyed Gary Taylor of 3ac.co.uk to start a campaign called 1&1 Are A Disgrace. I highly recommend you read it as it’s jaw-droppingly amazing at how incredulous their support is via email, telephone and twitter.

SEO Compatibility

Working at a digital marketing agency, I often deal with a large variety of providers, CMS’ and custom builds. 1and1’s “E-Shop” system is so bad that our SEO team have simply advised against dealing with potential clients who are using this system thus losing 1and1 money in the process.

The reasons behind this include:

• The inability to enter custom Title and Meta Descriptions per page
• The inability to install Google E-Commerce tracking
• The inability to install Asycronous Google Analytics code to the entire shop platform

I mean, seriously, if you were to advertise yourself as Europe’s biggest web host – wouldn’t you at least fix these simple problems within your CMS.

Hosting Location

Their servers are based in Germany in their very own a state-of-the-art datacenter. It’s nice, it’s impressive, but it’s also in Germany! They don’t tell you this unless you ask for it (or do a hosting lookup).

From an SEO perspective this can create a multitude of problems (not so much as they once did thanks to geo-targeting through webmaster tools). It’s enough to make Baby Jesus cry, and no-one wants that.

Complaints

They do have a problem with complaints flooding the web. Simple queries such as 1and1 complaints produce over 40,800 results with the following 1st page listings:

1and1 complaints (Google Screenshot)

You would think they would fare better with a query such as 1and1 recommendations with 717,000 results, but the 1st page listings tell a different story:

1and1 recommendations (Google Screenshot)

There cover may be blown due to several negative responses are now ranking for brand name searches:

1&1 (Google Screenshot)

1and1 (Google Screenshot)

If you are still looking to host a website with 1and1, feel free – just don’t come crying to me and the thousands of other people who already hate them.