Take More Risks

Thanks to King Nomar’s post last month I decided to set up a Google Analytics account to give it a whirl. Initally I wasn’t really expecting much bar a pretty interface and some cute graphics but wow, how wrong was I? If you haven’t already signed up for this service I seriously recommend that you do, just to gain a different perspective about how your site is performing.

I was skeptical to begin with because I was using Awstats to track my stats at the time, and since it’s a pretty comphrensive application, I questioned the need for another tracking program. It seriously is a brilliant tool for breaking down your statistics into manageable chunks. One of the neatest features has to be the Geomap too which provides you with information on where exactly your visitors are coming from. Visitors are represented with a yellow dot which grows in size as the number of people visiting your website from that area increases.

What can I say? I’m a convert!

Woooo! And it only took 5 months! Still £120 is £120 and I plan to place it straight back into the WebDev kitty. Which reminds me, you need to reach a minimum of £20 for Affiliatefuture to send out your payment and I haven’t heard anything from them. It seems as though I’ve forgotten to fill my payment details. Shit! I didn’t realise that they now pay by wire. When I first signed up all they sent out were checks. I think. I could be wrong.

I’ve been flicking through my other affiliate accounts too today and I’ve just found out that I have $50 in commission from Allposters that I wasn’t aware of. Sweet! It’s a pity that there minimum payout is $100. I seriously doubt that I’ll reach that tally any time soon as none of my content sites have Allposters links incorporated into them. That’ll change in a few weeks though as I’m planning on creating a number of websites dedicated to music and sportstars. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s strange to think that my Allposters earnings have all but dried up in recent years. This time, 2 years ago I was easily generating around £70 a week from their program, thanks to the allposters.pl script. That all stopped with Google’s Florida update though. I was still earning reasonable amount for the next few months but it was ever decreasing.

As hinted at before, the Text Link Ads campaign has turned out to be a failure. Sure enough I only gave it a month to take effect but still – the results within that time period were very unimpressive. In that 30 day period I registered a total of one referral. And that’s certifiable…….$30 in a month for a click is pitiful.

Alright, I can’t be certain what effect the ads will have upon my SERPS in the future. Frankly the improvement in the past month hasn’t been that convincing. Last month this website was receiving approximately 5 referrals a day from Google and it’s remained at that level since then. To me is just doesn’t seem sustainable. It seems that it’d be better to create a few articles around web development and link back to the site that way.

As well as this – recently I’ve started submitting the blog to a number of directories with a great deal of success. It’s worrying how many of those directories actually charge for a listing – taking into consideration that a few of them barely have any Pagerank to speak of. I’m confident that both the directory and article submissions will contribute a lot towards the website establishing itself properly within Google’s results. I mean, it’s a hell of a lot better than watching $30 or more slip out a month for absolutely nothing.

In saying that I might give the Text Link Ads publisher program a go within the next month or two. It has received some very favourable reviews on a number of blogs I read regularly. It’ll take a while for this blog to become properly established before I can consider that avenue though.

I subscribed to Text Link Ads a fortnight ago, investing in two links at $15 each for a month. Since then I’ve only received 1 hit from both of these sites which is a bit pathetic. I think I’d have been better off selecting a single site at $30 a month. Then again I could have opted to develop links organically by providing more content. Who’s to say?

Perhaps these links are responsible for Googlebot’s new found obsession with my website? It’s hard to know really as at around the same time I published a few eZinearticles with backlinks to this website and created a sitemap for Google. It’s a pity there isn’t a way to find out information like this.

At the moment I probably won’t reinvest in Text Link Ads. I’m currently not receiving any income from this website and the advertisements aren’t having a positive impact upon the sites popularity. There are more efficient ways to spend my money. I could have used $30 to run a short Adwords campaign to drive traffic immediately to this site. It’d be difficult to select the right keywords though as I cover more than one topic here. The phrases targetted towards affiliate marketing are quite expensive too…

This almost seems to be a yearly ritual for me! I’ll sign up for an account with good intentions and end up not establishing any links, forgetting all about it as the months roll by. Then when I try to login inevitably my account will have been deleted because of inactivity presumably.

Regardless of the past, I’ll need to start making inroads with CJ. If I’m to find success I’ll need to build sustainable income around a number of different programs. I’ve been reading far too many horror stories recently about Adsense accounts being banned for little or no reason, which leads me to believe that relying on it alone would be very foolish.

I’ll have to go back and find a few affiliate programs for each of my websites that are currently only serving Adsense ads. It’s always the more enjoyable part of the process, picking your ads and integrating them into the content.

True to form – the Allposters.com program has been my best performing program this week, thanks mainly to rockontshirts.com. It’s irritating in a way because I put very little effort into programming that site yet at the moment it’s my biggest earner. I’ve slaved away for hours on other projects and they haven’t made a fraction over what I’ve made in the past with Allposters.

I think the key to succeeding lies with creating stores dedicated to particular niches. In my experience integrating poster links with content produces god awful click through ratios. This is especially true with music and movie fansites.

Whilst if you have a niche store and put words like “buy” and “for sale” in the title and heading tags the sales just seem to keep coming. That’s if you have traffic of course, which is often a problem with sites containing affiliate links only.

I guess this is where Mashups and API’s come in handy. By providing additional content (such as photos or blog posts) on your site you are giving your visitors that little bit extra. Whether that’s enough is up for debate. I personally don’t think it is.

The best format would be to combine various poster retailers products and make a price comparison service. That way you can target the appropriate audience whilst providing a viable service. It might be difficult trying to match up identical products though.

In the meantime I’ll keep plugging away with Allposters Web Service and see what I can come up with.

I spent much of the afternoon scouring Google for the answer to this damn problem and still found nothing! So I decided that it was best to solve it myself and that I did! It was quite simple in the end, I signed up for a new tracking ID in the Allposters Affiliate control panel. I then organised my existing code that accessed the Allposters Web Service into a class to allow for greater flexibility.

I set my Ad group’s URL to http://www.rockontshirts.com?adw=true and included a condition in the code which checked to see if adw was set. If it was, then the new tracking ID was incorporate into my links via the class. If it wasn’t the default one was used. Simple!

There was an issue with this though. Whenever the user clicks away onto a new page the $_GET[adw] obviously wasn’t passed on so the system defaulted to the original ID. So to get around this I stored the value in the $_SESSION global variable and checked it instead of $_GET!

if($_SESSION[adw])
$ap->set(”WebSiteID”, 2022331255);

It may not be ideal, but it works in the meantime.

I’ve just noticed that some of the music t-shirt related keywords are priced at over £1! It should be fun trying to break even here. The maximum I’m prepared to pay per click is about £0.15. Even then its going to be very tight.

I’m an idiot. I’ve realised that the reason why my reported Adwords conversion ratio was so high for my last campaign was that I pasted the tracking code that you are meant to place on your order confirmation page, on every page! I’ve been watching some of the tutorial videos over on the main Adwords site and I still can’t grasp how you can track sales on affiliate sites. God this is so damn frustrating! I feel like I’m getting nowhere.

I’ll lay out exactly what I want to do!

Right I have a site at rockontshirts.com which offers T-shirts from Allposters. My adwords will be linking to rockontshirts rather than straight to Allposters. I obviously can’t paste the tracking code on the Allposters sales confirmation page so how can I work around this? I’m sure there is an easy solution here. I just can’t think of one at the moment.

Damn it, it still won’t connect. I really can’t be bothered searching for a solution to this tonight. It’s far too hot over here. I guess I’ll have to stick with Ebuddy in the meantime when I’m working on my laptop. Which isn’t that bad considering how much of an improvement Ebuddy is over the old Emessenger client. Extremely impressive and it makes me believe that the future of instant messaging services lies within browser based web applications.

I’m getting ready for Adwords Round 2! This time hopefully I won’t be knocked out in the first round. I must concentrate though on the task at hand which is finishing off the sites I’ve already started!

Still not much to report in the way of commissions. The performance of my Adsense campaign has been slightly disappointing as well. I’ve spent close to £10 now and am contemplating pulling the plug. I should really let it run until I amount up a few hundred clicks however I just get the feeling that the Clickbank products I’m marketing are lousy and never will perform that well. I need to have at least a little faith in the product for it to be worthwhile.

I really want to get started with Webmashups. I love the programming side of web development, it’s normally the content that’s the pain. I need to finish off a few other project’s beforehand though. I can’t seem to keep my concentration on one thing at the moment. Tried signing up for a Hot or Not API key but I’m yet to receive a response. Might try again later, I had an idea for a silly site.

Tried installing on SOAP on Dreamhost earlier on but I wasn’t getting anywhere really. I don’t really want to have to resort to using Nusoap though, part of the appeal of PHP 5 was that it had stuff like this built into it by default. I’m gonna develop rockontshirts.com next. Might use the Technorati API with it. Don’t know as of yet. I’m waiting on Allposters sending through the Datafeeds.

Damn it, I’ll leaving the Adwords campaign running in the background.