ExpertConsultant Blog » Affiliate Marketing

Special Godaddy Offer for UK

ExCo — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:54:45 +0000

Just received this message from GoDaddy. They are offering a special discount to the UK only customers. Any .com domain would cost you only $6.89 to register. This is cheaper than any coupon price.

To get this offer follow the link below:

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Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Selecting Products for Your Amazon Shop

ExCo — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:04:13 +0000

Let’s continue with our tutorial. But before we do it, few words about the purpose of this Affiliate Marketing – Standalone Shops series. First of all, do not expect me to repeat things that could be easily found on the authors websites like in the Associate-O-Matic forum. This would be waste of time both for me and for you. What I want to do here is to show that this type of shop could indeed top the Search Engine Result Pages despite common misconception that it couldn’t. Therefore if you don’t understand any of the technical details, please refer to the documentation and support sections of the Associate-O-Matic website.

First we should select a colour scheme for our shop. Go to the colours section and keep in mind few simple rules. If your shop is made for more mature customer base then chose more warm colours like different shades of orange (like on our tutorial site). For younger buyers choose very dark (black, very dark blue, very dark terracotta) background, silver-grey navigation and white main shop window. If your shop is universal the colour scheme should be white-light blue or white-gray.

Now it is time to fill our new shops with products. Using “sitewide keyword” is not a good idea, Amazon API returns lots of irrelevant results that spoil the overall impression. Therefore you should experiment in the category and use the “-“ sign to eliminate irrelevant products. For example if you want to sell Western Digital hard disks and type it into the keyword section, the resulted selection of products always includes some other products e.g. from Iomega. Therefore check you category one by one until you eliminate all irrelevant results by putting something like [western digital hard drive –iomega –buffalo] until only products that you intend to sell are included in the category.

Do this exercise for all categories. The reason is simple – keyword saturation for relevant results is much higher as well as a shopping experience for your customers is much better.

As you can see we are already learning some basic SEO. Now second and very important tip. I call it singular – plural play. All your categories have an entry called Cat ID, this is also important entry it should not be filled with random staff like cat1, cat2, etc. Use only relevant wording but in following way: if you are selling Hard Drives then put Cat ID as harddrive and Cat Name as Hard Drives. As you can see there is a singular word in ID and plural in the name. This is also important for our overall SEO solution for the standalone shop.

…to be continued

Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Standalone Amazon Shop

ExCo — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:38:27 +0000

I have sorted most of the problems with shops and have a spare minute to start the actual tutorial. First we are going to make a standalone Amazon shop. The tutorial site and shop itself are located at the feetwarmers (dot) co (dot) uk. To view the tutorial site replace (dot) by . and type it in your browser. I am not giving you direct link here to keep the experiment clean and not create irrelevant links to a live store.

Shop is built using Associate-O-Matic with minimum effort, in fact within just an hour. Associate-O-Matic or AoM is probably one of the best low cost solutions for building Amazon shops. It gives a professional look to your store straight out of the box.

Installation is very simple, but please note, if you want to use this software avoid “easy hosts” and use classic cPanel hosting companies. After uploading the package you should do some initial configuration. We have already spoken about obtaining Amazon associate account and you should take a note of BOTH (!) of your API keys as they are going to be inserted into the AoM.

Point your browser to yourdomain/admin.php and select login details. Keep your login name and password secure. After selection you can now login into your admin area and first of all choose the country you are building your shop for (in our case – UK) and insert all Amazon IDs. After pressing “Save” button your initial configuration is ready and you can start inserting products into your shop.

AoM itself has busy and helpful forum where you can ask all sorts of technical questions and find solutions to problems. In fact, I am not going to discuss actual settings in much detail here but I am going to show how to make your thin affiliate shop to do well in SERPs. If you check google.co.uk for the keyword combination feet warmers, you would see that our tutorial site is number one. This is the main idea of the tutorial – technical questions are being discussed all over the Internet but I want to show you that the standalone affiliate shop could actually be set and optimized in a way that it would bring you organic traffic and therefore customers. Organic traffic is when people type something in the search engine and find your site. This is the best way of obtaining customers as it doesn’t cost you anything but your time and effort. Even without much advanced SEO work it is still possible.

Many Internet gurus are saying that a thin affiliate shop would never bring good organic traffic simply because it would be treated as “duplicate content” and therefore go to the “supplemental pages” section. As you can see it is not true, thin affiliate site that we have selected for our tutorial is not even using built-in SEO options but still tops the SERP.

I am going to reveal some of the secrets of how this could be achieved. Watch this space.

…to be continued

Affiliate Marketing – Amazon vs Affiliate Window

ExCo — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:48:11 +0000

I think it is time to return to the long awaited tutorials. The delay was due to the problems with one of the hosting companies where the test sites were running. Unfortunately transfer took some time and if one tutorial site is already up and running again, the second one is a bit trickier to transfer so I need a bit more time.

The problem is, once site goes down for a while (and if the site is relatively new), then it’s position in search engine results page drops. And to understand is it dropping because the site is inaccessible or because search engines treat site as supplementary is pretty difficult. This is why the website should be clean and responsive for a while to get the results right.

Now the main question: which affiliate system to use? I know many people would not change Amazon program for anything else, others say that the Affiliate Window is an absolute leader in the UK.

Here we can do simple pros and cons and then you decide what to use.

Amazon.
Pros: Great variety of products, very good prices, lots of information can be retrieved using simple API method, populating your site is easy, the name is one of the most trusted, etc.
Cons: Commission levels are not so good and, most important; whatever you sell could not bring you more than 7 pounds.

The latest is a big NO if you want to use Amazon affiliate for any serious items like large plasma TVs, laptops, etc. Generally speaking, anything that costs more that 100 pounds should not be included because any other affiliate system would pay you much more.

Affiliate Window.
Pros: Huge selection of retailers, products from virtually all niches could be found including travel, hotels, etc., good commission rates.
Cons: They depend on feeds and therefore have no control over content, images, etc. Often feeds are broken and “no image available” icon spoils even otherwise nice looking sites.

Therefore Affiliate Window shops require some more effort and control from your side.

Now, my second tutorial site is being transferred to a cPanel host and once the search engines pick it up again, we will continue with the tutorial.

Affiliate tutorial – delayed

ExCo — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:06:28 +0000

Ok, people, I’ve got the idea. I know many of you are asking where the promised tutorial is.

I have replied to some mails but now decided to clarify the situation here as well. And I am not going to say that I was busy (well, I WAS, but this is not an excuse), the reason is – one of tutorial sites I’ve made earlier went belly-up simply because the hosting company introduced some changes to the Apache configuration, recompiled PHP and Zend Optimizer was disabled. I don’t know why they did it, but I recompiled my own PHP again, site went live and in a week time – same story. The situation started to get on my nerves and I decided to move hosting which requires some extra work and time.

Please, stay tuned, if I said that the tutorial will be published here, then it will!

Standalone Affiliate Shops

ExCo — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:50:57 +0000

First of all I want to thank all my visitors for the emails I’ve received on the Affiliate Marketing topics. When I did start the short tutorial, I didn’t realise that the response would be so enthusiastic. Well, unfortunately I was rather busy last month and couldn’t pay much attention to the blog and continue my tutorial. But maybe that wasn’t too bad after all. The thing is, I was planning to put many DIY tips on building a WordPress based Affiliate system. But as I understand from your messages, most of you want to have standalone shops based on off-the-shelf scripting systems.

After researching the market and testing quite a few offerings, I’ve decided to use two of them and show to my readers how they could make a working Affiliate Shop without putting to much work (shame, shame…) into design and implementation.

We are going to test two most popular Affiliate networks in the UK: Amazon and Affiliate Window. For Amazon I’ve selected Associate-O-Matic script, and for Affiliate Window the Datafeed Studio.

I am NOT going to compare these two scripts, as they would be used in a different manner and on different networks. But I would compare the networks themselves and we would check or Pros and Cons on building particular type of Affiliate Shops.

Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Choosing a Hosting Company

ExCo — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:17:44 +0000

Now you have you domain and decided on the platform, so time to choose where to actually put your website. Unlike general “Webhosting Review” sites, I am putting here only hosting companies that I do use myself for years and therefore know, what I am recommending.

We are going to subdivide Webhosting Companies based on the level of your technical experience.

1. Domain Registrars – Webhosts

If you are not very comfortable in changing nameservers, or doing other technical things, then often company which register your domain also offers good deals in hosting packages. Because hosts in this article are really tried and tested, I would strongly recommend getting yearly package which is best value for money. Even more, if you get hosting with them, domain would be either free or heavily discounted.

For the top-level domains, like .com, .net and others my vote goes for GoDaddy, it is not simply a leading domain registrar in the world but also one of the large hosting companies with many extra services. It is worth checking GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans or, alternatively, use another handy tools provided by GoDaddy to check for your domain and hosting plan straight from this article.

Second company Registrar and Host at the same time was already discussed in my previous article. Yes, we are talking about 123-reg, their hosting plans are also very good and prices for .uk GEO domains one of the best in the country. Therefore for UK-based hosting I would strongly recommend you to check their plans (click on the image below for more information)

2. Easy Hosting Company

In this case the definite winner is DreamHost. DreamHost is very large and reliable but very friendly and fun to deal with company. I do have more than 20 websites hosted with them, including several affiliate sites. For our particular case it is also strongly recommended at their easy (and I do mean EASY!) Wordpress installation comes with many templates already built-in. This will save you time searching and your Wordpress site might be up and running literally within minutes. Even more, I have negotiated a very special deal with Dreamhost and the coupon code I am giving you is only available from this website. This code will give you FREE domain (top level, .com, .net or similar) but this is not all, you are also going to get more than 50% off their yearly hosting plan. Therefore if you signup with my special code you are going to have both free domain and ability to host unlimited domains (Websites) with your new account for a year and for less than US$ 60. If paying by pounds, simply do you math. I am going to keep this unique voucher active for a while but will deactivate it in a couple of weeks, so don’t miss this chance. Coupon code is: EXCOTUTOR

3. Expert Hosting Company

I call this expert hosting simply because you should be experienced enough to take this type of hosting plan. If words like cPanel and Fantastico are familiar to you then I would nothing but praise for the Site5. Actually this article is hosted by Site5 – so see it for yourself. Site5 has excellent and very responsive technical support and above industry standard server uptime. But remember, this is “classic” host which requires some initial technical knowledge from you.

In our next Lesson we are going to put initial Wordpress Website and make it “live”.

Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Lesson 2 (Choosing a Niche and Domain)

ExCo — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:52:42 +0000

Now after we have decided which platform is going to be used, the next step is to choose a domain. Before that we should establish which marketing niche (what particular range of products) we are going to sell or promote on our ne website. It could be done either by checking reports, modern trends, gadgets, etc. for the cutting-edge bestselling products or by simply concentrating on products that are always in demand. For our upcoming tutorial site we would chose a product that is always in demand, but until we reveal it let’s discuss the general principles of domaining. Many people are tempted to get a name that says something to them or just sound nice, something like mycutelittleshop.com. This approach is only good when you have tons of spare cash to use for advertising. For our task we would stick to much more humble but useful names. We are making our venture for the UK market (you can choose any market you want, principles are exactly the same!) and therefore would concentrate on GEO domains. GEO domains (or geographical domains) are getting priority for any searches carried out from a particular country of territory. In simple terms it means that .co.uk would have priority over .com if search is performed from the UK. Popular UK GEO domains are co.uk, org.uk and me.uk. While co.uk is considered a priority domain, but the rest could do the job equally well. Also .co.uk names are mostly taken, org.uk is in better supply and me.uk has more good names still available.

Domain you choose should be keyword-rich, it means that if you are planning to sell, lets say, liquid soap, then you best bet would be liquidsoap.co.uk or liquid-soap.co.uk (yes, “-“, which makes domain look “uglier” is no problem for our Project), next choice would be in .org.uk, then in .me.uk. To find out what people actually search on the Internet you should use Google keyword tool. For our task I’ve decided to use a very common item which is always in demand – Wedding Dresses. Therefore typing this term in the Keyword Tool and then selecting “Exact” from the “Match Type” dropdown box we can see that the phrase “wedding dresses” was searched last months 368,000 times! Wow, jackpot, this is what I call good search result and popular combination of words. Now we should check if this combination is still available. To do it we need to find a company that would register domain for you. There are hundreds of them available but I would strongly recommend the one I, personally, use for many years for both price and service. Company is called 123-reg it has also provided me with the handy search box below, so you can check for your domains straight from this article. Therefore we would type “wedding dresses” into the search box below, click “Go” and bingo!

Search for your domain name

Weddingdresses . me . uk is still available, so we add it to cart and register straight away. Well, it’s not available anymore but check the one with “-“, as I said it doesn’t’ really matter for our Project.

So far we did the following: decided about platform, identified the niche and registered our domain. In next lesson we are going to discuss webhosting and are going to put our initial Website.

Affiliate Marketing – Lesson 1 (Choosing a Platform)

ExCo — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:05:25 +0000

In my last post I have mentioned two websites showing how the affiliate marketing website looks like. But we are going to do even more, we are going to built an affiliate website together and fill it with information.

Before we start, we should make one very important statement: real Affiliate Marketing is NOT about fooling people to buy useless products, on the contrary, it is a way of finding good, relevant products and services and letting customers know about them. This approach creates TRUST and customers do return for more. They also spread the word about your website and it attracts even more clients.

For our lessons I decided to choose a Wordpress-based marketing installation. First of all, Wordpress is very easy to customize and optimize for search engines. I would assume that you have basic knowledge of how Wordpress works, but if you are just starting to learn the system, then there is a highly recommended book, which would save you hours of research and learning everything “hard way”. This book is written in a way that even a complete newbie can easily find way around Wordpress and complete the exercises necessary to install themes and plugins mentioned in this series of lessons and I often recommend it to my friends and clients.

Some affiliate gurus might say that we should start from choosing a domain, niche, etc. but I disagree with this statement. Even with nicest domain you wouldn’t get anywhere if you don’t know what you are actually going to put on your new Affiliate Website. Therefore before jumping into domaining and hosting you should at least get familiar with basic Website building techniques.

I have already made a very basic Wordpress installation for our future site and in our second lesson we would discuss how to choose the right domain and hosting package. At that stage I would also show you how the very basic “landing page” of our Affiliate Website looks. Watch this space for more lessons in Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

ExCo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:48:02 +0000

Recently I had no time to update my blog, was busy with large chemical Project. But at the same time I know for sure that every eCommerce professional, even in the B2B area, should learn as many eMarketing skills as possible. It is impossible to predict what type of strategies could be born on the “cross-points” between serious B2B websites and B2C online sales. Therefore I am now concentrating in my spare time on one of the most popular techniques used on the Internet – Affiliate Marketing.

I have plans to write series of articles on this issue as well as give some practical cross-platform advice based on my own knowledge and experience.

We are going to discuss how to make use of modern techniques, including usage of feeds and converting feed into full eCommerce website. We are also going to see how Affiliate Marketing is different from PPC advertising and what the specifics of achieving are. In fact this series are probably going to turn into sort of a handbook or instruction manual for future Affiliate Website owners.

To make it even more useful I am going to discuss two of the most popular techniques for using the affiliate feeds: Implementing affiliate site in Wordpress blog and using predesigned systems for importing feed (like you can see in this example: Blu-Ray Player) and creating a stand-alone affiliate only website (like this one New Movies).

So subscribe to my feed not to miss any further updates and watch this space for more information.