JohnOBrien.com

It’s been nearly 2 weeks without a post on JohnOBrien.com so sorry about that I’ve been rather busy on two new affiliate websites and its half term as well so I’ve had my hands full, well the first site is completely new and the other I’ll tell you more about in a future post. I hinted about the new site here at the end saying I just had to get in on UK voucher code affiliate marketing, well I now have using a rather smart wordpress theme UKVoucherCode.com is born!

I jiggled around with the theme’s php and added a few plugins to create the site’s features including vouchers by shop name, vouchers by category, new vouchers, popular vouchers, top rated vouchers and exclusive vouchers.

I plan on adding as many new and exclusive discount vouchers as I can get my hands on (excluding other affiliate’s exclusive codes) and try and post at least 5 new discount codes per day.

The team behind the site pagerank10.co.uk have recently designed a new price comparison website pricesuk.net which features product feeds from many UK merchants.

The great thing about this for the affiliate marketer is pricesuk.net are offering merchant sub feeds for sale on a first come first served basis for only £199.00 per year meaning you can own and have your affiliate id embedded into all the products for that particular retailer with over 120 feeds still available when I last checked with more being added on a regular basis.

All the individual product feeds are linked to the main site so they work together as one big price comparison website, feeds are sorted by product on the price comparison section, but are also categorised by the merchant’s name.

Hosting is covered in the price and pricesuk.net will update the feeds or you can update them as frequently as you like by entering the URL to a csv file. You also have the option of altering products & columns displayed per page.

To kick start the site’s promotion and SEO the product feeds containing affiliate id’s have been imported into relevant pagerank10.co.uk full page ads with the products being displayed across the top of each ad, relevant products are displayed if someone uses the pagerank10 search, relevant products are also displayed under the “relevant pages” and links to the feed categories are also in the pagerank10 categories.

Based on the success of pagerank10 and the hard work of those involved I decided that pricesuk.net could be a very successful project to get involved in, so I have brought 4 sub feeds so far including PC World, Carphone Warehouse, John Lewis & Toys R Us.

AOL have announced that they have acquired the independent UK affiliate network buy.at which will now operate as a stand alone business of Advertising.com, which is a part of AOL’s Platform-A organization.

Buy.at believes the planned investment will allow them to continue its growth in staff, technology and infrastructure to maintain and even grow its offerings of products and services.

“Advertising.com and buy.at will be able to expand their advertiser offerings, driving more revenue opportunities for affiliate publishers who specialise in both e-commerce websites and retail focused content. This will help to generate sales for advertisers and increased revenue for publishers. Publishers will be able to work with Advertising.com and buy.at across several product lines, earning revenue for inventory across their display, video, mobile, and affiliate channels”

Buy.at has offices in London & Newcastle in the UK and New York in the U.S. They employ around 70 people and offer affiliate marketing in both the UK and the U.S. with over 200 leading businesses as its clients including 3 Mobile, The AA, Argos, BT, Carphone Warehouse, E.ON, HMV, John Lewis, Littlewoods, M&S, MBNA, o2, Sky, Tesco & Viirgin Media.

Advertising.com also has operations in the U.S. and ten other countries including nine in Europe.

For more details see the buy.at press release here.

The 2008 affiliate marketing awards have just been announced which will be held at the park lane hotel in central London on June 5th.

There will be 14 awards this year as follows;

Categories;

Best use of creative.
Best network innovation.
Best merchant innovation.
Agency of the year.
Publisher of the year.
Best use of affiliate marketing as part of an integrated campaign.
Affiliates4u award for excellence.
Publishers choice of network.
Publishers choice of account manager.

Vertical awards;

Finance.
Retail.
Gaming.
Travel and leisure.
Technology and telecoms.

The affiliate awards will be judged by a panel of leading affiliate marketing experts and submissions have to be in by the 25th April 2008.

Entry for each category is free and you are able to enter as many categories like.

You need to submit an A4 page executive summary to the category you would like to enter with any supporting evidence and if your submission is short listed you will be contacted  in early May.

There are also two publishers choice awards which will be chosen by members from affiliates4u, these being “publishers choice of network” & “publishers choice of account manager”.

For more information on the affiliate marketing awards visit a4uawards

Affiliate Window have just released a new ContentWindow suite of widgets giving you more functionality on your affiliate sites.

The ContentWindow suite of widgets now includes three 3 types; ContentWidgets, BrandedWidgets & ThemedWidgets with a new interface including a drag & drop feature so you can easily add, remove, edit & order the products displayed in your different widgets.

ContentWidgets - The existing widget found on Affiliate Window.

BrandedWidgets - This new widget lets merchants add designs for affiliate to use, BrandedWidgets available at present include those from Empire Stores, PrezzyBox and Woolworths.

ThemedWidgets - Currently these widgets include gadget, music, toy & valentine with more ThemedWidgets due out each month throughout 2008.

Affiliate marketers will be able to design and add their own ThemedWidgets which will be for their own use and merchants can design and add new BrandedWidgets for affiliates to use.

Also the interface for ThemedWidgets allows affiliates who create their own ThemedWidgets extra editing functionality to customise description, image, price, title & image.

The new ContentWindow widgets sound very interesting, I’m going off to try out the toy ThemedWidget right now.

I posted previously about the white label cash back website Unbeatable.net I had set up by eDealsUK in November and thought I would give you an update on the sites progress.

I have added 38 blog posts so far to Unbeatable.net, mainly including individual retailer’s current offers and latest deals, and I have been adding relevant current shopping theme posts such as Christmas shopping in December and now the January sales.

I was unsure how long it could take to start getting high listings in the 3 main search engines google, msn & yahoo for competitive phrases related to cashback shopping bearing in mind that quite a few other white labels cashback sites have also been set up, I decided at the start in mid November to try and post at least once every 2 days to give this project a fighting chance in regards of SEO and have noticed a few promising results this week especially in the yahoo search results.

Yahoo;
cashback shopping – ranked 9th
cash back shopping – ranked 4th
shopping cashback – ranked 6th
shopping cash back – ranked 2nd
UK cashback shopping – ranked 1st (outranked eDealsUK)
UK shopping cashback - ranked 5th
cashback shopping site – ranked 6th
UK cashback shopping site – ranked 2nd

MSN;
UK cashback shopping – ranked 11th
UK cashback shopping site – ranked 10th

Google;
UK cashback shopping – ranked 26th

Still a way to go I think, so I will carry on posting new shopping deals on Unbeatable.net’s blog every other day and see where the results are again in April.

All things SEM have come up with a comprehensive list of 55 questions that search engine optimizers might face when in an interview for a SEO career or at an agency, but I thought these questions would also be useful to the affiliate marketer to ask a SEO company if you decided to outsource some of your search engine optimisation work on a particular project and wanted help in picking a good one.

Technical / Tactics

Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry and while every SEO doesn’t need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart.

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you’ve written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today’s world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you’ve been workind for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important “on page” elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn’t you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

Analysis

A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competiting sites.

1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven’t been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do you help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay per click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results, how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Industry Involvement

Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.

1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’, ‘Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that’s a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? do you operate any blogs? do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?

Open Ended

These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer, but with no wrong answer they’re actually a good opportunity to shine.

1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get “xyz” company listed for the keyword “Google” in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and / or leaving any current projects?

I would also add that when searching for a good SEO company why not try and see how they rank themselves for particular search terms, so try entering “SEO”, “search engine optimisation”, SEO company” etc. into google and see who comes up in the top 10 listings, these companies obviously know a thing or two about getting organically ranked on the first page so you could consider contacting them first with some /all of the questions outlined above and go from there.

Tradedoubler have put together a handy “January Sales” section on their site with all the latest details of their merchants January special offers.

They have listed the January sale stores into 4 sections; retail, electronics, entertainment and travel with 31 online shops listed so far including Burton, CD-Wow, Dell, Ebookers, Opodo, Play.com & Tesco.

The good thing about it is for each merchant listed a sale start date is given and what offer is on for that retailer i.e. up to 80% off or half price sale, these will be very useful as I was thinking about how to find this kind of information to use on my affiliate shopping sites for the January sales only yesterday.

Log into your tradedoubler account now to find the January sale red box link.

A big thank you to all the affiliate networks, affiliate managers and affiliate marketers I have worked with in 2007 including but not limited to people from;

Affiliate Future
Affiliate Window
Affinet
Buy.at
Bet365affiliates
Commission Junction
Dgmpro
eDealsUK
E-Financial Affiliates
Leadbay
OMG
Paddy Partners
Paid On Results
Silvertap / Affiliate Marketing
Smartquotes
Sterling Leads
Tradedoubler
WASP
Other UK Affiliates

I hope you all have a merry Christmas and happy new year and I look forward to working and building on our business relationships in 2008.

Is it about time yet to take the work boots off and have a Christmas beer? OK maybe a couple more days work left tying up the lose ends / sending emails etc then definitely 3 or 4 days off to enjoy the festive celebrations!

I often think about the internet as the next big revolution to mankind, I think the lecturers at Coventry University where I studied computer science & psychology called it the information revolution but what really makes me think long and hard is the fact that the internet its in its earliest infancy even now, ok the net first went commercial around 1995 - 1997 but that’s only 10 years ago(ish) and I think you will all agree it is firmly here to stay, even long after we are all gone.

So what does this mean to the affiliate marketer, well I belief we are living in a kind of gold rush land grab and that affiliates already working from the UK who started around the year 2000 and even new affiliates who are smart & keen to learn from invaluable website resources such as affiliates4u.com have one of the best opportunities to make money ever realised.

Many of the posters on the affiliates4u forum including myself have multiple affiliate sites, with some affiliate marketers targeting SEO and some affiliates such as Kieron specialise in PPC, my point, there’s millions to be made through affiliate marketing and many are doing it right now.

A report on the BBC news television station today stated that over a 1/3 of UK consumers will be doing their Christmas shopping online this year alone, what will this be in 5 years or 10 years, I predict easily over 50% and with a couple of niche affiliate sites in your portfolio to deal with shoppers every whim, why can’t you take some of these rich pickings?

The overture search tool and the UK version have been useful assets for the affiliate marketer for as long as I can remember, it shows search volumes of a previous month for individual keywords and websites, and what obviously makes it so valuable to affiliates is it lets us see what terms the consumers are typing into the search engines when looking for a product / service, and in what numbers. I know it doesn’t include google search results but you can times 5 -10 the overture results for google according to popular opinion.  

So what has happened to the overture search tool? it seems yahoo who now run it have reduced its functionality heavily in recent months, but in the last week I haven’t been able to load their pages 95% of the time and if they do load any search ends up in an error page, please don’t tell me this tool is now being made redundant, I will have too search hard to find a like for like replacement to this very useful service.

Also I found the overture search tool helps me when I’m searching the daily deleting domain lists, I only do this every other-day now as having over 1000 domains is very hard to manage and I don’t  really need any more at this point in time (unless a real gem is dropping) and I’m now dedicated to developing existing “good domains” to create new affiliate sites rather than just forwarding the domain names to pay per click sites.

Other alternative tools worth considering when researching keywords are wordtracker, google & MIVA

Many of you will have heard of the legendary Kireon Donoghue from UK Offer in the affiliate marketing world, and he has kindly stopped by the johnobrien.com affiliate blog to answer a few of your questions.

PPC Forever;
Some of your websites are really taking off in the SEO wars and getting ranked very highly in google’s first pages i.e. bingo.org.uk ranked 13th for the keyword “bingo” and ranked 19th for the keyword “bingo online”, so do you plan on carrying on your massive ppc campaigns indefinitely or do you see a time when you will be earning comfortably enough off from your sites through the organic search traffic like you receive on bingo.org.uk?

Bingo.org.uk was actually number 6 not long ago for “bingo” so looks like I need a bit more work to do on that one! Anyway to answer your question, yes I still plan on running PPC campaigns, indefinitely. However I have cut back on some of the lower margin/high maintenance ones, such as the Broadband sector. For me its all about spreading your risk, so if I can make some money from PPC and another chunk from SEO then it just lowers the risk. The SEO side of things is going amazingly well at the moment too, its quite a novelty for me to earn money for “free” and I still get really excited about it. Right now I’m trying desperately to not be one of those webmasters who monitors Google every ten minutes to see if their rankings change!

Your Infamous Sitepoint Post;
When I first heard you had posted details of your affiliate earnings online I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, even dangerous perhaps with so many untold eyes looking into your finances, but now I can see how this has helped you firmly establish yourself as the top UK affiliate marketer, I humbly admit I have been following your blog for nearly 3 years and closely follow the advice you post, So why did you do it? what was your motivation for revelling all? or was it part of a bigger master plan?

I did it for a number of reasons, the main one being linkbait. That post is now almost 2 years old and yet still brings in new traffic every single week. Its also added massively to my online reputation and has given me some “credibility” as there are so many people out there who claim to be making money online and passing themselves off as gurus – when in fact they are anything but.

On Winning The A4U Affiliate Marketing Blog Award;
You are now officially the best in the business, how does it feel?

Really privileged to be honest. At industry events and get togethers I always get people coming up to me saying they read my blog and enjoy it, and I always get a real buzz from it. So to recognised in an official capacity feels really, really humbling.

Your Affiliate Marketing Plans For 2008;
With the new year just around the corner and new merchants / affiliate programs going live every week I was wondering what your plans are for 2008? Have you any new sites planned? or new vertical’s considering entering?

Yes, I’m going to be launching a fashion/health and beauty site very soon. But rather than spread myself too thinly I’m going to spend a lot of time maximising and optimising my existing sites to get the very best from them. Its all too easy to launch sites and forget about them but I’m now in the fortunate position to have a lot of “aged” domains in the Google index which are ripe for optimisation.

Your Blog Music Comments;
I am very curious about your “what I’m listening to right now” comment after your blog posts, Kieron are you sitting there raving it all day with your headphones on?

 Yes – apart from the headphones bit, I love to play my music LOUD!

And The Final Question, Just How Rich Are You?
2001 - 2007 have been the golden years in UK affiliate marketing, and I was wondering just how great these years has been for you?

Very great J As I’ve mentioned before though what I love about Affiliate Marketing is the fact that it allows me a lifestyle whereby I’m not tied to a desk/office. If I want to work I do, if I don’t then I don’t. So its not all about the money, it really is about enjoying life and the people near and dear to you.

And to keep in with Kireon’s here.org.uk blog style heres my;
what am I listening to now “I wanna be adored” by The Stone Roses.

Welcome to the new look JohnOBrien.com affiliate marketing blog, I have just changed the platform used for creating the blog over from the old blogger to wordpress as it looks much better, has a great range of extra features such as themes & plugins and will allow me to customise the site more easily.

I have managed to import the old blogger posts across into wordpress.org without to much trouble but will have to code all banners and affiliate links again.  I will also have to add 301 redirects on all the old blog post urls as these are now incorrect and are still indexed in the search engines.

Expect big improvements to this affiliate blog in the up and coming months.

Back in early April I wrote about the UK shops A - Z list that I was creating for my shopping directory spendingspree.co.uk, adding every UK affiliate program I could to it, well its kind of shaping into what I want it to be and has about 130 UK shop listings and linking to each other by category type, I was hoping to have about 1000 by now, but with other numerous affiliate marketing projects and 3 crazy kids taking up all my time I suppose 130 isn’t that bad. The new target is 1000 shops listed by Christmas.

The 3 main search engines have picked up these shop page listings so far, with about 10 of the 130 bringing okay levels of traffic so far, I expect with the 1000 UK shopping pages in place helping each other through internal linking, traffic should jump to decent levels.

I thought long and hard before creating online charities, is it ethical to design a website with the intention of making money from charities? well I decided yes because;

The charity shops listed on onlinecharities.co.uk will get greater exposure to the UK public than if I hadn’t of created the site, meaning a greater chance for the charities of receiving cash donations from people, also very worthwhile charities that don’t offer an affiliate program will still get listed on online charities i.e. NSPCC & RSPCA, the charities don’t have to spend advertising money directly to get new customers from my site and some of the affiliate commission are only £1 per signup i.e. CLIC Sargent’s & NDCS’s program, meaning its a very cost efficient means of generating new income.