well – almost.
It’s lovely when you find someone has found your site useful, and today i spoke with the producer of BBC2’s “Working Lunch”, who came across my site whilst doing research for a piece at the end of this week about getting fit without having to splash out a fortune on membership at an expensive Health Club. He even inquired about my availability to go in and be part of the piece – giving my opinion that it’s far better to avoid getting tied into 12 month contracts at pricey places until you’ve had a free trial and are sure you’re going to make full use of their facilities – otherwise maybe a pay-as-you-train option at a local leisure centre, or a shorter term offer may be better.
Alas, i’m currently residing in Bulgaria, and running things from out here, so it’s a bit much to pop on a flight to London in the next couple of days just to give a bit of free advice for 30 seconds on TV, but it’s sure nice to have been asked!
Perhaps they’ll just have to make do with someone who has strikingly similar advice on his site as there is on mine (although his site covers a much broader range or topics than just gyms). He’s proclaimed as the saviour of the ordinary cash-strapped people (bitter? me?) Martin Lewis. Not the newsreader, but the moneysavingexpert. He’s never shy of giving some advice in return for publicity!
To be fair to Martin though , He does run a good site. He works very hard, and gives people some great information. He also makes a fair old wad of cash out of his enterprise, which i certainly don’t begrudge him! I guess he’s where i would ideally like to be in a few years time. It just shows that if you can offer people some real value from your website, it can also make you a lot of money – you don’t have to have fancy web applications, the best graphics, or be the most proficient at SEO – if you can offer top quality useful information and get some initial publicity, it’s possible to develop a solid userbase who will come back to you again and again with word of mouth growing your userbase (although getting on TV regularly helps!)
My first grumble.
This section won’t always be about affiliate marketing, as i like to complain about a lot of things, but in this case it is – and it’s about the other people in the chain of affiliate marketing. I’d like to start by saying i’m sure they have lots of complaints about us affiliates, but i’ve never heard any, as they are far more “professional” than us when it comes to being diplomatic – at the end of the day it’s usually a waged post for a company that they occupy, so have to kow-tow to the old adage “the customer is always right”. In the case of the network, they have 2 customers, one at each end with both the merchants, and us affiliates they have to try to keep happy. It must be tough.
Anyway… enough of me trying to understand their side of things, lets get onto my grumble!!! I really, really, REALLY hate it when i don’t get a reply to my polite enquiries. I don’t email networks or merchants very often, and when i do it’s because either there is a problem with a program, or there’s insufficient info available about getting paid, or there’s been no updates about a previous problem. I realise there’s a lot of affiliates, and other work to be done, but taking 3 days to respond, or sometimes not responding at all just isn’t satisfactory! I shouldn’t have to send 3 emails, make 2 phone calls, then finally post a grumpy complaint to a public forum to get a response.
What makes this worse in my opinion, is it’s usually only when something is very wrong that this happens. People hate giving bad news, so it’s far more likely to be when there’s some problem with the payments, or the merchant isn’t answering the networks calls that you don’t hear anything in reply. It’s human nature. But what i’m saying is STOP THIS! I don’t mind bad news – i really don’t. I understand that nothing in this world is as simple as it should be, and things go wrong, but if it’s bad news please tell us affiliates so we can deal with it! It’s far better to do that than us pull our hair out over not getting responses and not knowing what’s going on. That doesn’t just mean with an initial response either. If there’s a problem with something, there should be an email update on the problem every single day until it’s resolved – even if that update is “merchant still hasn’t fixed their website, i’m very sorry, but i’m still hassling them to sort it”. That way (network folk take heed…) it still lets us know you are doing YOUR job, your network is proactive in solving problems, and if anything, we will simply ditch that merchant for being so useless, but stick with you guys for any other programs we can use.
Right! my first big rant out of the way, and i feel a whole lot better for getting that off my chest. I welcome comments from affilates, networks and merchants alike on their views on this, and also their own pet hates of what us affilates do wrong!
As i mentioned, I first set up a few sites back in late 2006, and had some mild success with them in the past. at its peak, due to the great offer of 6 months free gym membership that pruhealth used to provide, i once had a record month of 3 thousand pounds (back in 2007) – but this was a long time ago, and as the offer worsened, and has now totally ceased, i am realistically earning as follows:
December Earnings
so as you can see, i have an ok basis to work from, but it’s nowhere near my target. £96 in the month preceding the start of this blog, with a target of making £5k per month.
Now this shows me 2 things. Firstly, i hit upon one good idea with a great offer paying fantastic commissions, which at the time didn’t have a lot of competition. This is the perfect scenario, but of course it won’t last forever – even if the offer stays available, other people will notice it and start rival sites. You need to always be on the lookout for the next great offer to give you an idea for a site, so you don’t have an “all your eggs in one basket” situation. The second thing it shows me is that i have the ability to make money from affiliate marketing, as even though i’d done nothing with my sites for over a year, 2 of them were still making me a little money. something which with a bit of hard work writing some new content, updating them with new offers, and promoting them a little, should be easy to give them a kick up the search engines, and increase that income to what will fast start looking like something you can almost pay the rent with!
A lot of people are scared by the term “search engine optimisation”, but really, it’s fairly straightforward to grasp the basics. You can spend hours optimising things using the latest tips, tricks, witchcraft and sorcery, and it may push you higher on one of the search engines, but knock you down on others. If you just follow the basics, which are nearly all common sense, you won’t spend nearly as much time at it, and you should get good, steady improvements on rankings.
So we’ll start with optimising your template and making tidy code. This won’t be relevant to some people, as if they use ready made software like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, their hands are pretty much tied – however there are some good plugins around to just help clean up the code a little, and make sure the url is a nice descriptive one, hopefully with keywords in it if you’ve written the article title correctly.
For a normal, handwritten (or using dreamweaver, or similar editor) templates, first you need to make sure all of the javascripting, and any CSS code you use for formatting is in a separate file. This is a HUGELY IMPORTANT factor. Search engines like nice tidy code, and there is absolutely no reason at all why any page formatting instructions need to be in the page itsself, when one line in the header can link to the separate css file (or more than one if you like to be fancy and have different formatting for screen/print/mobile devices etc). Same for javascript. Dreamweaver loves to add javascript to the page for standard pre-loading of rollover images, and various other things, but it simply shouldn’t be there! just take it all, put it into a separate file with a .js extension, and then one line in the header can call the file. This often means that with those 2 simple procedures, the 200 lines of code the search spider had to wade through before it got to the relevant page content is now just 2 or 3 lines!
That’s the single biggest saving in terms of the template, but there’s plenty more still to do. For example, you should NEVER use tables to layout the page. Tables used to be the most used method to get everything displaying in the correct position on the page, as old browsers didn’t all work the same way with, or didn’t support certain CSS methods, but nowadays CSS is a very powerful tool, and should be exclusively used to manage the layout of the page, so everything is in that separate file i talked about. Tables are only suitable when you’re actually writing some information which, as the name suggests, needs to be layed out as a table!
CSS also allows you to have the useful parts of your page that you want the search engines to pay most attention to at the top of the body code, even if it’s actually halfway down the page when viewed in a browser. Take advantage of that, and have your <h1> tag for the page, and the accompanying paragraph of main text first in your code – but remember, <h1> is the tag for the single main header for what is on that page, and you’re trying to optimise each page for one or two key phrases, so have that phrase as the <h1> title, and also as the title in the <title> tag for the page. Then, don’t use <h1> for anything else on the page. If you want your other sub-headings to look the same as that first one, just use the <h2> tag, but use the CSS file to define exactly the same charateristics for both tags so in the browser they look the same.
That’s about all i’d suggest as the basics for the page template – as i said, you don’t want to be spending hours on every single page, so that should be enough to give you a head start over most websites out there. i’ll write other articles about individual page text, images, id and alt tags and more minor coding features, and then move onto the other SEO tasks such as getting incoming links to your site, but for the moment follow these 3 or 4 simple rules when making your template, and you’ll be off to a great start.
Pretty much the most essential thing you need to have in the process of making a website which makes you money, is of course…. A WEBSITE!!
To do this, you need somewhere to host it, and somewhere to buy the domain. once you have those two things, you can start to write the site!
Of course, a host of your own isn’t absolutely essential - you could start with a blog on one of the numerous free blog hosts like Blogger, but it’s a bit like saying you can win the grand national on a donkey. It’s possible, but it’ll take a damn good donkey, and a lot of luck.
So – my choice of host (and i’m not apologising for using an affiliate link!) Heart Internet. As i already have 4 sites of my own, and also host quite a lot of sites for other people, their reseller package is a snip for me at 35 pounds a month. They have lower priced packages too, and in 2 years with them i’ve always found their support to be fast and good. You can of course also register your domains with them – a very low price on .co.uk’s and also at the moment, they have a special offer of .com domains for 4.99 a year – very good. Once you have your domain, they have a wonderful control panel to administer it, and have a wide range of great software packages (like this wordpress blog software for example) which you can install with just one click.
So… now you have your hosting sorted, you need an idea which you think you can write a site about, and that you think can attract visitors with money to spend! I’d avoid such things as “car insurance”. Or just about any other type of insurance to be honest. The market is saturated, there’s some real big players out there with huge advertising budgets. you’ll have to be VERY good to get onto the first page of any search engine! You need something where people will spend money, doesn’t have loads of competitors already hogging the top spots on google, and there is some good commissions available from affilate schemes. Tricky, but it’s possible!
Welcome to Monthly 5k – my new blog about attempting to (re)start my new life away from the 9-5 slog, and reach a monthly wage that it would probably take me my entire working life to attain if i stayed in the rat-race and worked my way up the corporate ladder.
You can read the full about me at your leisure if you want to know my whole background, but basically i’ve worked on websites and programming since 2000, and have dabbled in a bit of affiliate marketing since 2006, but never put massive time or effort into it. This is now going to change. I’ve spoken to a good friend of mine – Matt Bailey - who is considered a bit of an authority on the whole affiliate marketing stuff, and set mysel a target according to his words or wisdom. Whilst some folk rake in upwards of 20k a month from huge online empires they’ve spent years building, i don’t think i’m going to get to that level. There’s a lot more competition than there used to be, and it’s difficult to get into the big paying markets. However with his statement that “given the desire and requisite skillset, working full time on affiliate marketing, 3-4k a month (GBP) shouldn’t be too tricky to achieve”, I set my target at earning 5k a month. It’s a nice round figure, which most people can relate to as being an enviable monthly wage, and will provide more than enough for me and my family to live off. This blog will keep a record of how i go about either succeeding or failing to achieve my goal! hopefully giving other people some motivation to set their own goals and go for it, or alternatively provide some insight into the affiliate marketing industry and my battles to break into it.