Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

Earlier today I posted an article about the Direct Line Affiliate program (on OMG) and their new above the line TV advertising. I have a fair few readers on the blog so was unsurprised to see some traffic come though straight away but was quite amazed at how quickly google picked up on the article.

As you can see below I received a couple of visitors starting from just 1pm come though to the site - seeing as it was around 10pm that I posted the article that means it took just three hours to get into the serps for these terms.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a term rank so quickly but the first time I’ve really measured it - I do wonder if this is a result of the normal google web spider or something to do with the blog spider; whatever it is it’s pretty damn good though.

I also ping a few different servers (list in the SEO Wordpress Guide I wrote in January) which may have something to do with it.  An example of this would be that another site that I run powered by wordpress recently ranked for a targeted keyword before I pointed even 1 link at it (or wrote any decent content)!  Google wasn’t displaying any links to the site either, so the only explanation I could come up with was that I posted some tests blog posts and got picked up from the pings.

As suggested in my previous blog post I have now moved everything across to the 3wdl domain name and installed a new more €œfresh€ theme as the old one was getting a bit stale - I have also taken off the advertising space for the time being and fixed the annoying image border on the photo in the sidebar.

Always interested to hear feedback and hopefully the change will inspire some more posts.

Will be interesting to see if the site gets picked up a bit better in search after the domain change.

You may well have noted the lack of posts to the blog over the past few months since I started working at eyefall. I thought I should let you all know that this, in part, due to a few changes that are coming up to the site.

I originally started writing the blog again back in October last year, installing wordpress (which i’ve used a lot since) after b2 had clogged my old site up with spam. Unfotunutely some search engines have never forgiven me for the spam (bloody Yahoo) and my rankings have been pretty low overall. With all this said I have decided to switch to a different domain which I am working on getting up and running at the moment and expect to launch within the next week or so - a new fresh design and a 301 redirect should mean that the posts start to come back.

I’m not sure what to do with my theme.   I’m never happy with the look of my sites and in it’s years of existence (when I actually bothered to post) this site must have had about 20 different re-styles.

I’m debating the idea of changing it again to another widget supported theme, but am sure I’ll still be unhappy with whatever I chose!

On another note - thank you to Fraser for showing me how to setup the feedburner stuff. I switched over my RSS links a couple of days ago and it’s showing as having 40 subscribers so it’s nice to see I have a few people reading my posts who would not be showing up in Firestats or Google Analytics.

If you do have any feedback on the design please feel free to comment.

I just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.1 today so hopefully everything is appearing as it should be. Please let me know if you spot any issues.

On other notes, I purchased BusinessBlog.org.uk today but am not sure exactly what to do with it. Please do comment if you have any suggestions!

To get something out of the way quickly, I wanted to write a quick note on the comments policy here - it’s been mentioned in a comment on another post but I though it would be a good idea to reiterate it quickly.

Anyone can post a comment here - I’ll approve it as long as it meets the following criteria:

a)    it’s not spam
b)    it has the users real details - anonymous comments won’t be posted

That’s it - if you want to flame me, you are more than welcome to do so, and all I ask is that you don’t hide behind a computer screen and that you reveal your true identity (that means you, Devils advocate!)

Anyhow - that’s just a side point.   One of the real reasons of this post was to talk a little about the Affiliate Challenge that has been started recently.  I’m a little late to cotton on to it, but I’ve decided that I will be entering and in time (when the site is ready) I will reveal what my chosen entry will be.   The site will have no PPC budget (I have no money for that kind of thing) and will be organic growth only.

The aim is not to win the challenge - the industry that I will be creating the site for has a long lead time and works on a revenue share (it’s not gaming before anyone asks), but I will be using the site as a case study for this site and detailing it’s progress (or lack of!) and stats on this blog.

For more information on the challenge, visit: http://www.affiliatechallenge.co.uk/

Happy New Year everyone.

Todays find of the day has to be snap.com, which I have now integrated with the site.

There is a wordpress plugin for it, but I could not get it to work for some reason, so used the javascript code it produces.

There was a client poker evening last night.   I drank too much, today I feel bad.  Must go to sleep now.

Although I’ve only recently changed my hosting, it seems as though I may have made a bad choice as the current hosts are a bit rubbish.

So I’ve been looking at dedicated servers and have found a German host (with a good reputation) with the following offer:

€¢ CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+
€¢ RAM: 1 GB DDR400 RAM
€¢ Duel HDD: 2 x 160 GB SATA HDD
€¢ NIC: 1 GBit OnBoard
€¢ Admin Software: Webmin
€¢ Network Availability: min. 99%
€¢ *Traffic Usage is for free. Restrict the connection speed to 10 MBit/s if 1000 GB/month are exceeded. You can request an activation for 250 GB at a time free of charge in administration interface.
€¢ Free Internal Traffic
€¢ IP Addresses: 6 (subnet 8 )
€¢ 24×7 Email monitoring
€¢ 50GB Backup Space
€¢ Full root access
€¢ Reverse DNS Administration
€¢ Traffic-Statistics
€¢ Free Phone Support
€¢ Free Email Support
€¢ Online Live Support
€¢ Data-Centre 24/365 Stand-by-Service
€¢ Min Contract is 1 month

So - here’s my plan. The cost for the server is $100 (EUR) Setup and $40 (EUR). I am looking to split this cost with 4 other people (5 total users) - it would have to be people i’ve met or know is trustworthy.

I already have one person - so at the moment there are three slots. The maths works out that the setup would be £13.50 each and £5.40 per month.

If anyone is interested in the three avaliable slots please get in touch. Payment would need to be made monthly via bank transfer.

Update: Another person in - two slots left
Update 2: One more in - one left
Last Update - All gone; thanks for the interest

…but it’s been a over a year since my last post. I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I very randomly met with my old MD from Field & Trek. He mentioned that he looked at the site every now and again, so I decided it was about time that I got around to updating it.

I work for an iGaming firm called St. Minver these days as an Affiliate Manager for their Bingo & Casino sites.

Family wise Kieran has just had his 4th Birthday and Jacob is now around 18 months old. Lindsey still manages to put up with me somehow.

Google have released a Sitemap feature.

It should allow my site to be indexed a bit better, but it’s still in beta, so who knows.

There is also a b2evolution script for google sitemaps