Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

After a little rant in my previous post, I hinted to setting up some free blogs on an affiliate URL that I didn’t use. Since then I have discovered Wordpress Mu & installed it on AffiliateManagement.net. There are no ads, it’s completely free & easy to get started. There are a number of installed themes and I’ll be adding a few widgets and plugins to get people started shortly.

Hopefully it will encourage a few more affiliate managers or merchants to start blogging and discover another excellent form of communication and relationship building.

Are you an Affiliate Manager, A merchant or a Network?   If yes, do you have a blog?  If not, why the hell not.

Seriously - I’m still surprised at the lack of blogs from people in the industry.  They are free, they are easy to setup and take hardly anytime to post on.   You can replicate your e-mail newsletters, your forum postings, etc.   You can talk about upcoming events or you could just talk rubbish.

So here is my offer, be it to Affiliate Managers, Networks, Merchants, or whoever.   I have an affiliate marketing related domain name that I do not use.   If you would like a blog, I will set you up a wordpress install FOR FREE.  That’s it - no catches, just give me a few hours after your request to set it up and it will be done.

I won’t put ads on it, I’m not trying to monetise it - it’s a genuine offer.

I don’t expect a rush of people, but if it convinces just one or two more of you to start posting regularly then the world will be a better place.

From the excellent vecosys

I use lots of MS products - I’ve never been an apple fan but Mozilla has helped bridge a gap and more online word processing stuff from google means that I won’t be upgrading my office anytime soon. I have tried Linux as my main OS using Gnome a few times but always found some reason to switch back, but even my wife can use that GUI now so if I managed to back up my main HDD I may try again.

I should really note that I don’t for one minute claim to be an SEO expert, I know little bits and bobs from knowing a few really good people in the industry and reading sites like Threadwatch.

So today sees the launch of the SEO World Championships, sponsored by eastpoint, an SEO company.

The target phrase will be released at around 6pm GMT, which happens to be when I am on the train home, so I won’t be able to get the first .com registered.

The rules are quite simple and it’s all based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.    There are some nice prizes and it will be interesting to see how well it is picked up by the SEO community.

If you are taking part, please do comment and let me know.

As mentioned in my previous posts on the Affiliate Challenge, I decided to launch a new site dedicated to Unfair Bank Charges.

I thought that it would be interesting to post my stats since it went live. To give a little overview of the timeframes involved, I purchased the domain on the 1st January. On the 2nd put up a Wordpress install and started to get content up for the 3rd / 4th January. The site was at a €œcomplete€ point on the 6th January.

The first crawl by google was on the 3rd January and the second on the 9th January. I saw my first rankings appear on the 10th January.  (Sorry for the quality of the images below - I only have MS paint at work, which is a bit crap).

Obviously the visitor levels are quite low at the moment, but it’s good that I have started to rank for some terms & with the addition of further content this should start to improve over the next two weeks.

Although the domain name was picked because there were few avaliable, I’m starting to regret this. It’s hard for people to remember & i’m starting to think about buying a new name and redirecting it.

MyBlogLog, which can be seen in the right column of this site, has been purchased by Yahoo. It really is a wonderful widget which I like a lot and it’s integration with Yahoo (meaning that you will be able to login via your yahoo id) will hopefully make it a lot more widespread.

A big congratulations to the owners of MyBlogLog who are expected to have sold it for around $10m.

2007 really is shaping up to be the year of the widget.

As a side point whilst we are speaking of widgets in the right column, I’ve now had the Buy me a Drink link up since before Christmas, yet no-one has obliged!

I’m currently in the final stages of design for RefundPack.co.uk, which will be launching an affiliate program over the next week or so - the tracking is already implemented and working.

This is a new experience for me - I’ve launched a number of affiliate programs, but never been my own merchant, so it will be interesting to see how this one progresses.

The site is pretty basic - if you have any comments on it please let me know - up to 50% commission will be on offer so hopefully it will go down well & be a new opportunity for affiliates to explore.

It’s official - there are definitely some pervy bloke on MySpace.

After the launch of my new site about Unfair Bank Charges, I decided to have a look at the marketing opportunities of MySpace and see how much traffic it could drive though to the site. I installed a MySpace bot and had a little play.

Resulting MySpace Profile

I needed a profile to start the bot with, so I found a thread on sports related forum that I visit and added him & started off the process adding around 40 people.

Within 12 hours I have 24 friends and a couple of hits from using the demo version of the software, so I may well register for it.

The crux of this post is that I have received a few messages from MySpace members since I added their profile, and thought I’d share a few of them.

Firstly we have Chris, who sends the following:

So you are a single 27 year old, on here, for a persuit of more customers and a rich sugur daddy, to help him spend his hard earned cash? So what else mystery woman? What are your interests, what music do you like, and do you where thongs, or knickers?

A bit forward for our first exchange of messages I thought, until the next one I got, this one from Brett

hey there my sexy
how u been?
i miss u soo much?
reply soon
i will always love u x

How random - maybe it’s someone who thinks they know me. Then another from Brett comes though:

Hey I hope you dont mind me messaging you? I just saw your profile and wondered if you would like to get to know one another? Brettxx

Sorry about that last message my friend thought it would be funn xx not happy xx sorry xx

Who says romance is dead. I now need to decide if I start to wind them up or not - any suggestions?

Everyone works differently, but if you’re short term memory is as bad as mine you may find that working towards a shedule when creating a new site can work very well.

In this case study I have created a google calendar and jotted down a few tasks to work on over the next week to help get the site complete. This can be found below:

A few posts ago I mentioned that I would be entering the Affiliate Challenge. I’ve now been working on a few hours and it’s very much underway. Seeing as the concept has already been revealed by Detective Matt, I thought I would reveal a few details.

The site is aimed at the Unfair Bank Charges market - there is currently only one affiliate program that offers a revenue share on this service, so I imagine that adsense will also be used across the site.

I decided on using Wordpress to update the site as I’ve been hugely impressed with it since converting my blog over in November.

I’ve only made a few modifications to the form, but I have installed the following plugins which are certainly some of my favorites:

- Adhesive: Allows €œsticky€ posts
- Admin Menu: Displayers an admin toolbar at the top of the site when logged in
- Adsense-Deluxe: An adsense plugin, surprisingly.
- SEO Title Tag: Allows you to do loads with your title field via one of the option pages
- Sidebar Widgets: Allows you to modify the sidebar quickly and easily via the template section
- Ultimate Tag Warrior: A tagging plugin that’s used on this site too and is required for SEO Title Tag
- WP-Forum - A build in wordpress forum

I still have a few more to install and will update when these are done - now that the site has started to take shape my main priority will be to get some content created and then look to get a few links in. At the moment I’m hoping to get quite a bit of content sorted by the end of the week and then a bit of link building over the weekend.

I’d also like to run some kind of viral email - I’m still deciding on exactly how this will work but I have a few thoughts in mind.

Hopefully within the next two weeks I will start to see a bit of traffic.

Oh - almost forgot the link: Unfair Bank Charges