This affiliate marketing game is so damn hard.

Since the last post, I’ve been following the Black Ink Project where updates have slowed to a crawl and I’ve also completed Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge.

The 30 Day Challenge was great and I learned a load of techniques for market research, keyword discovery, traffic generation, etc. but unfortunately, using a Mac, I couldn’t get any of the automated tools to work.

Market Samurai, the main tool used in the 30DC, looks awesome but it just wouldn’t work on my machine (an Adobe AIR issue). Luckily, many of the operations can be carried out manually so that’s what I did.

Key takeaways from the 30DC for me were the value of StumbleUpon for short bursts of traffic; that Squidoo is still a good idea and that Adwords is still as impenetrable as ever.

My next challenge is to try to crack landing page design - I’m just being killed by this on all of my sites and seems far harder to get right than getting clicks in Adwords.

So far, the Odyssey has been a complete failure with no money made - I am still going to see this thing through!

I was really looking forward to this session in the hope that it would reveal some of the secrets of link building.

For the first time in The Black Ink Project, I came away disappointed as I didn’t learn anything new.

Being positive, this means all the reading I’ve done has paid off, but it would have been great to pick up some new tips or techniques.

Finally, Aaron’s presentation style wasn’t quite as upbeat or inspirational as Amit’s PPC webinar and so, overall I felt slightly deflated.

What I hadn’t realised was what a great speaker/tutor he is.

Last night I caught up with he and Jeremy’s Black Ink Project webinar on PPC and it was pure gold.

There were so many “aha”, “doh” and “wtf” moments for me that I found it hard to sleep afterwards, scribbling down pages of notes and thinking about how I could integrate all the tips into my campaigns.

I really am going to have to start again with my AdWords campaigns - I’ve fallen into so many of the traps Amit highlighted that it just isn’t funny.

If you’re a newbie PPC marketer, or even if you’ve been doing it for years, you owe it to yourselves to check out the webinar here - it’s free FFS!

Having a “one week on, one week off” system is great for catching up and I am now fully up to date (well almost - I was too tired to catch last night’s PPC session with Amit Mehta).

Here’s a quick review of what I’ve taken away from the project so far:

WEEK ONE

Session 1 - Finding Your Niche

• Find a niche which you have knowledge, experience and/or passion for.
• Focus on one niche fully before looking for others.
• Do one thing and do it really well.

Session 2 - Getting Your Business In Order

This session was targeted at US-based marketers rather than us here in the UK however, there were some relevant issues.

• Make sure you speak to an accountant and get a clear idea of the best vehicle for your business.
• I already have a Limited Company status and am VAT registered and luckily, have a great accountant.

Session 3 - Developing a Rock Solid Business Plan

• Fail to plan, plan to fail!
• Use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to understand your planned business.
• Competitor analysis is crucial, demand analysis even more so.
• Find a unique angle for your business and add some value - microsites are dead.
• Try to understand your customer and their behaviours

Session 4 - Getting to Know Your Audience

• Understand how to split your niche market into customer personas.
• Look at how your merchants are advertising and presenting their websites - they have much bigger budgets and teams than you.
• Sign up to community forums and get involved - find out your customers’ pain points.
• Go through the buying process - actually buy something from your merchant!
• Go wide then deep on keyword research bearing in mind the keyword buying cycle: Browse, Compare, Buy.

Session 5 - Setting Up Shop

• A budget of $1000-$2000 is ideal for starting out.
• Stop buying info products.
• Only spend what you can afford to lose
• A time budget of 20-40 hours a week is ideal.
• Stop multitasking, write a list of things to do, then do them.
• Unsubscribe from most of your rss feeds, newsletters and DO NOT SURF!
• Turn off all distractions when working - yes this includes twitter and email!
• Learn to say No.

WEEK TWO

This week focussed on the technical aspects of setting up a website which is what I do for a living.

It was great to see that the way I do things when building sites for clients is almost identical to the way that Jeremy builds his own websites and so there wasn’t too much in the week’s sessions that I didn’t know already.

The key session for me, was on landing page design.

This was illustrated, not just with the page designed for the project’s ultra portable laptops, but also with reviews of project participants’ own sites and landing pages.

I can’t stress enough just how valuable the information in this session was - if you only sign up to view one webinar session, this is it.

The landing page session was so detailed that there is no way I can do it justice with a list of take home points - you really need to see the whole thing.

Just for completeness’ sake, here is a list of the sessions from Week 2:

Session 6 - Architect a Bulletproof Site

Session 7 - Designing a Visually Appealing Site

Session 8 - Concept to Construction

Session 9 - Making Your Site Dynamic and Fresh

Session 10 - Landing Page Design

SUMMARY

Halfway through the project, I have already noticed a difference in conversion as a result of changes to landing page design and I can’t wait to get stuck in to the PPC and Social Marketing sessions this week.

I’ve been looking for a digital photo frame as a gift for my parents and specifically needed a 10 inch+ display.

I, of course, Googled and clicked on a promising looking ad.

The display url immediately redirected to a merchant which had exactly what I was after (with great customer reviews, returns policy, etc., etc.).

That’s when it happened - I simply copied the product’s url out of the address bar, closed down Firefox (which I have set to clear all cookies), restarted Firefox, pasted in the url and bought the frame.

I remember thinking, sod you, if all you can be bothered to do is a redirect then you don’t deserve any part of my hard-earned cash.

I now feel bad…

Have any of you ever done this or am I the only affiliate spoilsport out there?

What a beauty.

This is just about as valuable a resource as you’re ever going to find and incredibly, it’s free!

Here are some nuggets I took away from the 79 minutes:

1. No niche is too competitive.
2. Look for niches where you have knowledge or experience or passion and preferably all three - this is more important than what the niche is. Zac Johnson has a post today which pretty much reiterates what Jeremy is saying.
3. Look to take a small part of a large pie or a large part of a small pie.
4. Where niche magazines are on newsagents’ shelves, there’s gold to be mined.
5. Stop chasing markets and market conditions - stick to what you know as per number 2.
6. Direct linking is still a great way to test a merchant’s viability in terms of conversion.
7. If you’re running an affiliate campaign at under 1% conversion, it’s time for a rethink.

Jeremy’s mantra for affiliates is “Do One Thing. Do It Really Well”.

It’s time to choose.

It’s time to win.

Well somewhere in the ether, I came across a new training course he’s running for affiliate marketers and what’s more, its free.

After my miserable failure on Eric Guigere’s One Post A Day (Eric didn’t succeed either BTW), I feel it’s time to accept another challenge requiring commitment - in this case 8 weeks.

Jeremy’s new course is called The Black Ink Project and claims to take an aspiring affiliate marketer from first principles through to a working affiliate program.

In his words:

The project focuses on four key areas:

• Setting realistic goals, based on your time and budget. You’ll discover how much time and money you need to invest to achieve your goals.
• Researching prospective opportunities. You’ll learn out how to avoid potential pitfalls and find the right niche and the best advertisers.
• Learning the software, scripts, and tools to help you create your site. You’ll not only leave the course with a complete tool belt, you’ll learn how to use your tools alone and together to create beautiful high-converting sites.
• Develop and launch a campaign from start to finish. At the end of the course, you’ll have a complete action plan and checklist you can use for future sites.

The course started yesterday, 5th May, with a webinar which ran at 3pm PST or 11pm here in the UK which is a tad late for me to have the necessary concentration levels. I plan to catch the recorded versions, broadcast the day after, so I’m looking forward the first session today.

I really hope I can keep up with this program as it seems to offer so much and I’ll of course be keeping a log of my progress here.

Can’t wait to get cracking…

There are more than enough “How To”  sites out there but maybe not enough “Why To” blogs so, from now on, that’s what I’ll be doing.

For many new internet  marketers, myself included, the lure of limitless wealth, copious free time and an altogether fabulous lifestyle, is almost overpowering.

Affiliate marketing promises to return a steady income stream, 24/7, for seemingly modest  amounts of work, but the truth couldn’t be more different.

To be even moderately successful requires far more work than any paid job I’ve ever had, but here’s where it gets interesting - it’s actually fun and doesn’t feel like work!

I think about marketing all the time - it keeps me awake at night.

Every situation, every person I meet, every product I use, I ‘m always looking for the angle, the way to leverage each experience to benefit  my marketing efforts.

In short, I’ve become obsessed.

What’s more, I think you have to be like this if you’re going to succeed.

It’s an itch you have just have to scratch.

Electric 6 are on Kerrang singing High Voltage, the familiar “ping” for new email arrives.

I flick over to Mail to check what’s come in and spot a new post in my RSS feeds by Dave N about a quite improbable offer from one.com for free domain and hosting for a year - I check it out. Might be worth a punt for a year.

The dog barks and I need to let her out, the fire’s dying down too - need more coal.

The ads come on Kerrang so time to channel surf  - Scuzz looks good, Maroon 5 do not.
Oh no - just noticed Wordpress needs updating for this blog - I’ve already updated 4 other blogs today.

It has gone midnight and I’ve achieved nowhere near as much as I’d like.

It’s like this for most people, most days.

It’s why the girl at the checkout, distracted by thoughts of the coming weekend’s drinking, gives you the wrong change.

It’s why your bank takes 5 days to sort out a problem that should take 5 minutes.

It’s why most classrooms are out of control.

It’s why I haven’t made enough any money.

It’s why things have to change.

Domain naming is the most hotly debated subject on the web with camps split between those who recommend short, memorable names and those who believe keyword-rich names are the way to go.

Eric recently posted 3 Steps To Keyword-Rich Domains which, when looking at an affiliate campaign, seems the right way to go.

My new gardening site is going to need as many factors in its favour as possible and regardless of the debate, I’d like to get maximum SEO benefits.

About a week ago, I had an idea that I might like to do a gardening blog so I did a similar exercise and came up with the domain cheapgarden.co.uk (the .com had already gone) but there was always the chance, using Eric’s method might turn up something better.

Following Eric’s advice, I tried the following set of keywords in the Google Keyword Selector Tool:

garden, gardening, gardens, how to garden, garden tips

Looking at the results, I had one eye on advertiser competition (as I’m going to be running a PPC campaign) and the other eye on possible domain names.

After entering the keyword combos into GoDaddy, nothing really stood out so cheapgarden.co.uk it is!

The beauty of this domain is that it is reasonably short, easy to remember and its keywords fit in front of lots of other keywords to produce long-tail terms e.g. cheap garden tools, cheap garden furniture, etc.

Choosing the Platform

This really is a no-brainer - it’s Wordpress all the way!

I’m not prepared to spend weeks developing a theme so I plan to scour the available, free themes all over the net and then modify one to suit my needs.

This exercise must take no more than one day so for the next 24 hours, I’ll be sorting this out.

Tomorrow, the process of creating some content for the site begins, ensuring that articles and posts contain plenty of opportunity to link out to products.

I’ll also be checking through Eric’s archives to see how best to maximise Adsense income too!