I am determined to get it up by the end of this week.  GreatCamerasguide.co.uk will profile the best digital cameras.  The site isn’t up at the moment - well it is, but I’ve got the Launchpad theme from Themeshaper on it. And Google is coming visiting every few days so it shouldn’t take long for it to come back and index the pages when it’s up properly.

I have a few things left to do:

1. Glossary - I have developed a glossary full of technical words relating to cameras and photography.  I have used the WP Snap Wordpress plugin.  I’ve just about got it working but need to style it to look more like my site.
2. Add content - I’m trying as hard as I can to get some content written.  I’m trying to target some search words which might attract some visitors before Christmas.
3. Sort some images - I need to download some camera images and resize them - a site trying to sell cameras with no images of the actual products would be pretty poor.
4. Sort out all the analytics tools - it’s all the things like registering the site with google webmasters and google analytics
5. Boring but important content - I’ve got to sort out all the legal stuff, privacy policies etc.
6. Upload it all to my hosts
7. Activate Akismet - I won’t be forgetting that lesson again.

I shall be foregoing my evenings television (and my ironing - that’s no hardship believe me!)  to get this sorted and it might involve some late nights but I’m determined to get something up soon - I’ve been faffing around for far too long now.

I am worried about it though - once it’s up I really do have a proper commitment to make.  It will still involve hours of work every week - and I want to add main shop part - probably using PriceTapestry - so I will still be working hard on it over the weeks to come.

Why not subsribe to my GreatCamerasGuide feed to see if I manage it!

So how on earth did I forget to activate Akismet?  I have been absolutely bombarded with spam comments and it’s overloaded my inbox and it makes me want to shout really loudly in a silly voice “I hate spam”. 

Well that’s not true - my mum used to make us spam fritters when I was a little girl and I recall them being quite nice!  But I’m older now and my memory’s not what it used to be and Jamie Oliver would have my guts for garters if I tried serving that up to my kids.  But I digress.

When I set up my site locally I don’t have to worry about using Akismet - comments aren’t something to bother me in my own little localhost environment. Nearly everyone in my local world seems to be nice to me and I am quite happy tinkering about.

But out in the big wide WWW there are some really nasty creatures out there who want to make my life a misery when I don’t even know them.  Well not any more!

I headed over to Wordpress.com, got myself a good old API key - and the spammers are hopefully gone.

Are there any other things I can do to protect myself from spam?  Please leave a comment - no spam allowed though!

First off I had half term with the children, then I’ve had my son’s sixth birthday, my husbands 40th birthday, double glazing being installed, my birthday, my mum’s birthday - I seriously don’t know how I found time to go to work!!

I can’t let this keep happening though.  I haven’t been posting here - and I haven’t been developing my other sites either.  I’ve been dabbling a little with designing a skin for my Affilistore sites, but other than that absolutely no progress has been made - I now fear I have missed the Christmas rush as there is a likely couple of weeks work still to do.

I also reckon I’m going to have to go back to work too in the new year - so I have to get my head down and concentrate between now and Christmas but I also need to spend time looking for another job.  Groan.

I like writing this blog though and I even have a few subscribers - but I guess they’ve all disappeared in my absence!

As I said in the title I forgot all my passwords so I’ve spent the morning documenting everything so I am more organised and structured.  The one thing i have managed to buy in my absence are a few more domain names though - all for future projects!  Nothing like running before you can walk.

This blog isn’t going to be a massive earner for me - just a bit of light relief - so I probably need to be more focused on the real sites and less on here - that’s rich considering I’ve been absent for a month already. I need to get myself into a pattern of working, a really structured day - it’s what I had when I was working and I could be quite productive when I felt like it! 

So I’ve off now to write some content - hopefully I can finish an article before lunch - and then work on the site design this afternoon.

Well if you are still in doubt then consider this.  Have you heard of Google Bombing? It’s a deliberate attempt to force a page to the top of a search engine - when it’s not setting out to target that phrase.

An example of this, before Google got wise and changed their algorithms, is when searching for the term “more evil than Satan himself” would return Microsoft to the top of the search engine.  Now that’s an unlikely term to be searching for I admit, and if you searched for the term “miserable failure” it would bring up the White House’ official site in no 1 place!

But some well known SEO experts in the US are now competing to the “the coolest guy on the planet“.  You’ll find Brad Fallon up at the top.   He’s one of the guys behind Stompernet - a membership only SEO and web optimisation course - a very expensive course at that. 

And his Stompernet co-founder Andy Jenkins - well he’s just content to be the second coolest guy on the planet.

Now, look what I found when I googled best UK affiliate blog.  Could this be a competition in the making…

As I understand it, it has to be a two pronged approach: content and linking.  So, lets explore this further:

What is content?

Apparently content is king.  Content is pages, content is information, content is words, content is keywords.  Without these things there is nothing for all the search engine bots to index.

If you provide good content you should create a sticky site - a site that people will return to and return to.  So whilst we’re talking about human visitors, they need well written content - grammatically correct, with headings and paragraphs and content that is all highly relevant to their search.

The search engines therefore take notice of page titles, headings as a guide to what the page is about - just like humans do. 

What is linking?

Linking is is what holds it all together!  It’s what joins the pages together - it’s what helps to create a sticky site - a natural path from page to page to page - or even site to site.

Humans like to be clearly led - they don’t want to be led blindfold - they are suspicious of what some websites contain - and equally they are made angry when there are broken links - or a link that leads to the wrong page.

I am using a link-cloaking WordPress plugin on this site, but that’s mainly because some of the links are affiliate links which sometimes to me look really suspicious with all the numbers and IDs in them.  If you mouseover one of my links you should see the words “secure_link” which I hope is a bit more reassuring.

To help with internal linking on this site I am also using a similar posts plugin.  I have set this text to appear at the bottom of every post - it will list 5 most related posts, and I also use it to provide a link to the previous post.  I don’t have much content on this site at the moment so some of the results are a bit way off to say the least but as the number of posts grow this tool will get a lot better.

This will also help to keep the search engines on the site longer - there is deep cross linking going on.

But it’s not all about internal linking - the value of the links coming in to your site should not be underestimated.  Search engines treat the links pointing at a page as a primary authority for what the target page is about.  You can have both one-way links, and reciprocal links - a kind of “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” thing!

There are ways to find out who is linking to who, and also find out what sites are using what keywords, which I’m delving into at the moment - and all I can say is that it’s interesting - very interesting.  Considering I’m writing this whilst watching Spooks - I feel like I’m carrying out my own espionage!  I’m my very own Spook!

So to sum it all up here’s a short list of things you/I need to do:

1. Pick a search phrase you want your page to rank for.

2. Choose a title for the page which includes, or is a variation for, the phrase you want to rank for.

3. Write a headline that confirms what the page is about.

4. Write your content - making sure it contains not only the exact phrase you want to rank for, but also the separate words in that phrase.  This helps everyone, humans and search engines understand what your site is about.

5. Create your internal links - using the navigation of the site - the main navigation menu, links in your footer, and of course a sitemap.  Also try and link your pages together within the content.

6. Go out and get some external links to your site.  This helps with ranking, but also with getting visitors from that site - cheeky!

So not much to it really!  Seems like a daunting task - considering I have about two pages written of my main site written at the moment!  If there’s anything I’ve forgotten please let me know!

I had a really good day on Friday last week.  After getting back from the  school run and putting the washing on, and then trawling through my emails I finally sat down at 11am to have a play with Affilistore.

I had already downloaded it - but it’s not like that takes any time in any case.  I then followed the really detailed instructions given here.

Now, I have three sites that I was thinking of using Affilistore on - all in the same vain and similarly brandable - so I decided I would do each step on each of the three sites at the same time.

By 1pm - I had the basis of three sites up and running!  I still had a lot of configuration to do, in order to get the store to display exactly what I wanted, a logo to come up with, etc but I reckon that if I had sat down at 9am and worked on one site all day then I would easily have one site up working properly.

From the looks of things Affilistore does well on the Search Engine Optimisation - but it could still be tweaked and you have to work on the datafeeds to produce your own unique content but if you wanted to run a Pay Per Click campaign to the site you could be earning money in little under 12 hours - I think that’s amazing.

The basic script is free to download and use, but if you don’t want to pay for it you have to put up with the 11 outgoing links in the footer.  I’m not prepared to give away that link juice so I will be stumping up the £100 to remove the footer links - because that’s a one off payment and applies to every site - so the more sites you have the cheaper it is.

The styling of the site is pretty simple - and there aren’t many skins available so customisation is all down to you but some people have done some pretty clever stuff and if you are any good with CSS and a graphics programme then you probably stand a chance of making something look more unique.

I’m not intending to use Affilistore as a price comparison site so my next task is really to go off and look at the merchants again - to look at the prices they charge and the commission I would earn and decide which one I should promote.

One of the things I was most concerned about when I learnt about affiliate marketing was how I would get product feeds into a site but Affilistore really does deal with this side of things really easily.  It would be easy to get a basic site up within 24 hours - allowing for styling and customisation.

On Monday I signed with Affiliate Window. I am intending to enter the consumer electronics field - particlularly cameras - and Affiliate Window have some of the really big high street names - Comet, Dixons, PC World - along with some of the names known more for their internet presence such as Pixmania.

If I wanted to do a price comparison site - it would be better to include these merchants so signing for Affiliate Window was an absolute must.

In fact Affiliate Window has over 70 merchants in their Electronics sector so I knew I would have plenty to choose from and started the sign up process.

The first thing that I was surprised about was having to pay £5 to join. The fee is designed to discourage unscrupulous affiliates intent on making dishonest or fraudulent commissions from merchants on the Affiliate Window network. This fee has been credited against my account and will be returned as part of my first commission payment - lets hope I get one then!!

My application wasn’t instant but took about one and a half hours to be approved. Not long to wait but not as quick as Paid on Results.

Once my application had been approved I was free to sign up with the merchants - and I signed up with quite a few - probably too many for my own good bearing in mind I have now received 28 emails from Affiliate Window merchants - I feel a bit overwhelmed, especially since I’ve only had two from Paid on Results in the same period. Not only that but there are also 51 messages in my AW account.

I haven’t had a chance to use the ShopWindow toolset which i’ve read good things about - it did after all win the A4U 2008 award for Best Network Innovation - but that will come over time. I did however manage to download a datafeed today - first time I’d done something like that it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be.

Overall it’s been a positive experience so far and providing I can build a decent site, I’m sure I will earn some commission from Affiliate Window. But as it stands right now: Current Balance £5.00 - but that’s my own money anyway!

The main benefits of the organic search are that it doesn’t cost anything - other than time spent writing content.  However if you don’t appear high enough in the search engines what chances are there of your site getting anyone come visit you?  I think I’m probably quite unique in that I will quite happily work my way through to page 10 of Google if I’m looking for something in particular - and you find some real gems down there.  However I think I am probably quite unusual so if you’re past page 3 you can probably say goodbye to any chance of getting significant traffic.

I don’t want to rely only on organic searching.  It will take time to add content, build links and optimise my site.  Being unemployed at the moment, whilst I have the time to write content I don’t have time to wait for the visitors to come.  Paid advertising is the way to do that - but it’s also a really easy way to lose money too - something I can’t afford either,

So I had to start doing my research and invested in the Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd.

Perry Marshall is really an adwords guru.  His books are the most popular ones written on the subject and came highly recommended to me.

I got half way through the book during the weekend - and if I hadn’t been interrupted by little children then I would have been able to finish the whole book in an afternoon probably.  It really is an easy read and I have a much better understanding of the subject now than I did beforehand. 

The book walks you through setting up a campaign, how to test it and refine it to get better traffic for the same money and how to write killer ads.  I’m confident that I can build a much better campaign thanks to this book and would thoroughly recommend it.

Using all the techniques he mentions you should over time be able to develop a strong and profitable campaign - can’t wait to try it out.

I’m not sure why I chose them to be my first. Admittedly they did have a full list of merchants I was able to look through and there were a few that matched my niches that were paying relatively good commisson.

It was extremely easy and quick to sign up and I got approved straight away and all the merchants that I wanted to sign up with were on auto-approval so I could, in theory, have started promoting them within minutes! If only I could write some content that quickly.

The interface presented to you when you log in is very intuitive - and you’re greeted with the balance of your account and a graph showing your performance. Terrific if you’re actually earning some commission. At the moment I’m still being greeted with Current Balance: £00.00 and a completely flat graph!! Shame!

Once you’ve registered your websites you’re free so start signing up with the merchants, and the creatives i.e. banners and text links is all there too.

All in all it was a good experience so far.  I was really pleased with how easy it was.  I’m impressed and hope to do really well through Paid On Results.

If you would like to see what merchants Paid On Results currently have click here.

Once I’ve done a bit more work I’ll review again to see whether I’m still so impressed.

There are a number of things that you want to bear in mind when looking for a domain name.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords!

You should always choose a domain that contains keywords that describe your website.  When you appear in the search engines it will help attract visitors if the domain name contains the word they were searching for.

Remember there are various ways of operating an affiliate site.  You could run a magazine style site with lots of articles with links to relevant products or you could run a price comparison site, or just a more general shop but with products from lots of different merchants all brought under one roof.  If you want to be doing price comparison then look for words that indicate that too - compare, comparison etc.  Unfortunately I missed out in the auction that Kieron recently blogged about - I’m sure it wouldn’t have had anything to do with his post though!  I had spotted it too and was quietly watching it waiting to put in a bid - then one of the biggest blogs in the industry mentions it. Ho hum.  Unfortunately my meagre funds don’t stretch to £1000 for a domain just yet in any case.

The shorter the better.

Its easier to remember a short name so the shorter the better e.g. shoes.com would be better than mysiteallaboutloveleyshoes.com.  But best of luck trying to get a one word domain name nowadays.  They will come up at auction but be prepared to pay a high premium for them when they do.

Try and stay away from using initials as the domain name just to keep it short - a jumbled set of letters won’t make much sense to most people.

To hypenate or not

Ideally a domain name should never have more than three words in it - and if you do have to use three, consider whether the hypenated version is available as well.  A hyphenated domain name is much easier to read, but a non-hyphenated one is probably easier to type e.g. all-about-domains.com or allaboutdomains.com.

If you go for only one option - someone may well come along and buy the other one, and when it comes to a customer remembering your name and typing it in, it will be easy to make a mistake and you will end up losing visitors to the other site.

Plurals and Misspellings

There was an interesting thread on the Affiliates4u forum the other day which revolved around the plurals of domain names.  So consider whether you want to run into a similar issue.  I have chosen to take this route with a couple of my domain names.  Within my niche more people seemed to be searching for price rather than prices -so I have snapped up both - and it avoids the issue referred to in the thread.

What domain extension?

It depends on your market.  If you want to market only in the UK then a .co.uk extension will be just fine - and next after that would come the .org.uk.

I have chosen to buy the .com extension for all of mine - as they were available.  Over time it might be that I want to run an american site/shop on the .com extension so I thought I would get them sorted at the outset. You just have to make sure you manage the redirect properly so you don’t run into the duplicate content issue.

How to find a domain?

I use a couple of tools to help:  domaintools.com which has always come up with some helpul ideas but doesn’t show the .co.uk as a domain extension, then 1and1.co.uk who have a good suggestion tool as well.  There are other sites which also tell you what domains are coming up for renewal, and which ones have just expired - and which ones are up for auction!

I use 1and1.co.uk as my registrar.  It’s easy to transfer the DNS settings to a different host if that’s what you are looking to do but they also offer some good deals on hosting themselves.