Don’t Click This

I’ve had a shitty day today. I don’t know why but I just woke up and felt like crap. I’m sure everybody has had one of those days where you just feel your working towards an impossible goal. I can’t work when I’m in this kind of mood, and to be honest it’s hard to be productive if you aren’t feeling very motivated so I don’t even try. I did make 20 bucks on Pacific Poker though!

Anyways, whenever I get like this I always go back and read a forum or blog post about someone else’s achievement in affiliate marketing, which always seems to help with motivation. And I know, people say that you need to get off your ass and ‘do’ not ‘read about’ but it does help. I suppose you just gotta keep plugin away and know Tomorrow’s another day…

(er…I didn’t mean for that to rhyme and sound gay. Honest.)

Ok, so I’ve spent most of today sending out link requests, very tedious but it’s got to be done. I’ve also signed up for several MTB forums (I don’t intend on spamming, just providing a link in my sig). I basically did a search on competitor sites to see who has linked to them, searched for related MTB sites and searched for MTB directories to submit to. I’m also planning on seeing if I can get some links from some personal MTB blogs too. I’m considering starting up a blog for the site itself and I’ve had a pretty good idea to both encourage people to visit the site and submit content, so I’m going to look into that a bit further too.

The site is currently indexed in MSN, but only the homepage and the site is nowhere to be seen in google, hopefully that’ll change in the next couple of weeks. I’m already starting to reconsider the whole ‘not spend a penny on advertising’ thing I had going on earlier but I would really like to see the site grow on it’s own ‘naturally’ so to speak. Ah well, guess I’ll sleep on that one.

Just a quick post, I’ve now got my first subscribers, which is cool. The Feedburner widget is currently showing 4 so thank you to whoever you are! Also, I’ve come across several blogs displaying this tool which values your blog. Mine is currently at $3,951.78 - Not bad for a week and half!

A while back I also came across this valuation tool which values websites domains, the tool used to come up with some interesting results; Youtube.com was apparantly worth under $1,000 and myspace.com was so bad that the owner should have paid someone to take it from them! I think they’ve improved their algo now though!

I’ve just read this post from the ‘Evolutionary Imarketing Success’ Blog, and although it brings up some good points about both paid and unpaid or natural site traffic, I think the general message they are trying to get across that paid traffic is always superior is misleading. In my opinion, it depends on the type of site you’re running and that kind of sweeping generalisation cannot be made across the board.

If you are running a site that basically consists of just a landing page with some text and a link to the merchant then yes, paid traffic is probably the way to go as you’re unlikely to get ranked highly in the SE’s and finding sites to link to yours will be tough. However, if you have a content rich site which can get tons of inbound links due to it’s unique content, the SE’s will probably rank it well and it’ll get decent traffic for free. Ok, so this are two very general and simplistic examples and obviously both paid and natural traffic can go hand in hand for a lot of sites, but you get the jist. Essentially it depends on the type of site, but to say that paid traffic (although it may produce quicker results), will always be the most effective is wrong.

I’m setting up my latest site in the hope that I won’t have to pay anything for traffic, but I’ll have to wait and see if that’s going to be viable or not and how well I rank naturally in the SE’s. To be honest if I have to I don’t have a problem with paying for traffic so long as the end result is profitable, but I know it isn’t the be all and end all. But then again, what do I know? I’ve only been in this game for a few months…

Before Christmas UK affiliates were asked if they would participate in the first ever affiliate census. The results have now been published and there are definitely some interesting statistics. The most surprising statistic in my opinion was that nearly half (49%) of all participants earned just £500 or less per year! I guess this further supports the 80/20 rule too. Quite a few people have had something to say about this already and I don’t really want to repeat what’s already been said, so here is a link to download the census and some links to other people’s opinions on the results.

UK Affiliate Census Results (Word Document)

Lee McCoy - My Take On The Affiliate Census

Fraser Edwards - UK Affiliate Census Results

Paul Wright - Exactly Who And What Is An Affiliate?

A couple of my sites including this blog have been offline for around 6 or 7 hours I think, apparantly there was some problem with the air conditioning in the data centre where the servers were housed and they began to overheat. Anyway, all seems to be fixed now but it’s been a pain in the ass because there was a ton of stuff I wanted to do today and haven’t been able to until just now. In all fairness though, this is the first time I’ve had any kind of problem with my hosting company 34sp.com and I’ve got to say there service is usually fantastic - I’d definitely recommend them!

Ok, I changed my mind about the whole get 30 articles up first thing, I’ve got 15 and I think it’s time to start advertising the site once the design is completely finished. I am going to keep writing at least one article for it everyday anyway. I’ve decided not to post a link from this blog, mainly for competitive reasons, but I’ll be posting all the results of my advertising schemes, visitors and earnings etc.

I’ve just got a few aesthetic tasks to deal with but it should be nice and ready for the masses in a few days. My long-term plan for the site is to eventually have it run almost entirely on user submitted content, but I’ll have to see how that goes. I’d eventually like to offer private ad sales once traffic is up too, but again it all depends; for now I’ll be using adsense and affiliate links.

Forget the 140 Million Dollar Mansion, for just £170,000 you could purchase this spectacular flat in a prestigous area of London! It’s total floor space is less than the size of a snooker table!

Original link from Radu’s Real Estate Blog.

So my first week of blogging and I think I’m off to a pretty good start, I’ve had 427 visits and 826 pageviews - not bad for a first week. My Technorati rank started at over 2,500,000 and is now at 740,154, which is quite an improvement. I think I was quite lucky though as the link from John Chow Dot Com helped a lot! Anyway, below are a couple of great sites that have also helped get my blog noticed.

Buzzbums.com
A blog directory that automatically displays the latest blog posts on the front page, which is great as it means someone is almost definitely going to visit. This has sent me a fair amount of traffic and some of the other blogs on there are very interesting reads.

BUMPzee.com
Only found this one a few days ago and it’s already proving to be a great way to promote my blog. My post about BUMPzee has been bumped to the front page too!

I found this site on my web wanderings yesterday; it’s a social networking site/blog directory. It currently only hosts affiliate marketing blogs, but I assume more ‘communities’ will be added soon. Basically, you add your blog and your posts are automatically submitted to the community. Members can then bump any posts of interest, so it’s essentially a Digg for (at the moment) affiliate marketing blogs (which is probably a good thing as some Digg chumps users seem to have developed a resentment towards this type of blog recently).

I think this is great. I love reading about other people’s experiences with affiliate marketing, but there are so many SEO guides and advice type blogs that it can sometimes be a mission to find the genuine, personal blogs. I know there are people who are looking for guides etc and sure, they do have some good tips and advice, but there’s just too many off ‘em!

For example, I registered my blog at Blog Top Sites but if you look in the Internet Marketing and SEO section virtually all the blogs are ‘a guide to this’ and ‘tips on that’. Enough already!! I dunno about everyone else, but I much prefer to read business or affiliate marketing blogs that have a personal perspective.

Anyway, I digress. Basically, I really like bumpzee.com and they’ve already sent me a decent amount of traffic even though I only registered yesterday. I suppose the best thing about it is that your blog posts will definitely get seen (if not read) by people browsing the site as they are automatically submitted. And if you write really interesting posts then you should get a fair few visitors to your blog, so make sure you submit your blog asap.

By the way, I got to the last sentence of this post before accidentally pressing ‘back’ which erased the whole thing. There’s now a wall shaped dent in my fist…teach me not to ’save and continue editing’…