Affiliate Marketing, SEO, Wordpress and miscellanous ramblings

Ok, I’ve finally managed to get a new skin together for my gift ideas website which runs off affilistore.  I’m still not happy with the search button but it will do for now.  I’ll be updating further parts of the look and feel in phases.  Phase 1 was to make the site look less like the default skin, there is still some work to do with the layout of the product pages and to replace the “visit store” button with something more in keeping.  Phase 2 is all about unique content through product reviews, guides and articles.  To do that I have turned to most peoples favourite blogging platform wordpress with the idea of pulling through the latest article, guide, review etc to the main affilistore part of the site, similar to the default news and featured product within affilistore.  Phase 3 will be to implement a gift suggestion tool based on the type of person, age etc that the visitor is buying for, this will present gift suggestions held within the affilistore database, I’m just not sure quite how to approach it yet but it’s further down the line so nothing to worry about just now.

To date the site hasn’t broken any income records but it has started to make a few sales each week which is  promising, all of it coming from organic search and long tail search terms, usually the product name.  The first week in Jan 2009 saw a trickle of visitors turn into 70+ a day which was maintained for a week before the site dispeared from the serps and then returning with similar results but a slight dip in overall traffic which has remained stable up to now.

Overall I’m impressed with affilistore and will continue to use it but more as a base to build on.  I’m not going to be shy with hacking up the original code as I’m not bothered about keeping it in a state where I will be able to update it with new releases.

Anyway back to the integration of wordpress.

I’ve spent the last few days looking at affilistore and have used it to revive an old gift based domain I have had doing nothing over the last year or so gift-inspirations.co.uk.

I’m still getting to grips with the custom navigation side of things but seem to have cracked it and have implemented an ajax tab script for popular products, stores and searches to minimise the number of boxes in the side columns.

I’ve also dusted of my command line skills and written a small script to download affiliate window feeds to my webspace and use cronjob to refresh the feeds which seems to be working ok although it has only been tested on one feed so far.

Yes it is still a work in progress and yes the colour scheme may well be from a very popular comparison website but I intend on spending a few minutes each day on it and will eventually get round to working on the deisgn when the backend is doing what I want.

All in all a good script (even more when you consider it is free) that so far seems to be working well, some pages have already started to appear in the search results for very specific product related phrases and has been indexed well.  Wait until the unique content goes in.

Give it a go.

Anybody who uses or has looked in to using Wordpress as a CMS will no doubt have come across the excellent revolution themes by Brian Gardner but if you are prepared to search a bit further there is a multitude of excellent “premium” magazine type themes available, my favourites being

Options by Justin Tadlock

Mimbo by Darren Hoyt

Wordpress Magazine Theme by Gabfire

For an even more detailed list of free wordpress themes click on over to  http://socialcmsbuzz.com/20-free-wordpress-magazine-style-themes-08072008/

If you haven’t come across these before I hope you find them useful.

It’s now been a couple of years since I stumbled upon affiliate marketing and put up my first banners and text links.  In that time I haven’t made that much money from it but I have learnt a lot.  The biggest lesson I have learnt is that little site traffic equals little affiliate commissions, simple really.  You could also dumb that simple equation down even further, little effort equals little affiliate commissions but that got me thinking.

If I’ve managed to make pocket money from the very little traffic that I got from some of my early sites surely with more effort and hard work I could make more money?  That’s obvious I know but the way I see it many “would be” affiliates would have dropped out by now, difference is I enjoy it as well.

That leads me on to my question, is seo enough to make decent money from affiliate marketing?  I hope so is my answer.  I’ve been putting in a lot of effort to the seo of my recent site and have seen traffic steadily increase, fall of the planet (thanks google) and then steadily increase again.  This organic traffic is still very low but  I have made some affiliate sales and being in the travel vertical a single commission of £25 for one sale seems like a big deal at the moment.

I’ve been developing a site using Wordpress as a CMS and up until now things had been going great.  The wealth of plugins and support available on the Internet coupled with its “out of the box” SEO friendly reputation was enough to win me over.

I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks that page load times seemed to have increased for both the front end (seen by visitors) but especially the backend admin pages. A few weeks back I updated to version 2.5 but I’m loathsome to upgrade to the latest 2.6.1 as I’m aware that some of the plugins have not yet been updated.

To address the front end page load times I installed the super-cache plugin.  As my site doesn’t have any dynamic content that gets updated regularly such as “most popular post” etc this wouldn’t be a problem for me.  In a nut shell what it does is serves up a local copy of the pages content instead of querying the MySQL database each time.  I’m happy to say that this seems to have decreased the page load times on the front end of my site considerably with no ill effects or problems.  I just need to play around with the plugins settings to get the expiry times etc working effectively.

Some plugins could also be the cause of slow page loads.  You could disable them all and then re-enable them one by one checking each time if it has an effect on the page load time.  For those of you who use Firefox there is a great plugin called firebug that you can use to diagnose how long each element of your page takes to load.  For an excellent guide on doing this see http://www.paulspoerry.com/2007/08/04/diagnose-slow-wordpress-performance-using-firebug/

The admin pages were another matter.  navigating between admin pages was taking over a minute in some instances, totally irritating and useless.  First I disabled all plugins to check it wasn’t one of them effecting the admin pages but this had no effect whatsoever.  Secondly I turned on MySQL query cache by adding the following lines to my  my.cnf file

query-cache-type = 1
query-cache-size = 20M

I then restarted MySQL and for good measure I restarted my Apache server (I’m on a dedicated server)  Fingers crossed this seems to have had a positive effect and the admin pages are now running much faster and more importantly are usable.

I just hope it stays this way.  I have a number of sites in the pipeline that I was planning on using wordpress for as the CMS

I offered a simple solution to redirecting affiliate links using .htaccess previously now heres one using good old faithful PHP.

Save the following code as a .php file, naming it is your choice. (For the example it is called link.php).

$path = array(
'link-1' => 'http://www.aterriblelongaffiliatelinkhere.co.uk',
'link-2'=> 'http://www.anotherterriblelongaffiliatelinkhere.co.uk';
if (array_key_exists($_GET['id'], $path)) header('Location: ' . $path[$_GET['id']]);
?>

replace the ‘link-1′ etc with a keyword describing where the link is going and also the corresponding URL of the affiliate link, when you add more than 2 links make sure the last link doesn’t have the comma after it.

Upload to the root of your website

Now if you go to www.yoursite.co.uk/link.php?id=link-1 it will redirect to ‘http://www.aterriblelongaffiliatelinkhere.co.uk

If you want to clear that up even more

Put the following lines in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/([/_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)$ link.php?id=$1

Now if you go to www.yoursite.co.uk/go/link-1 it will have the same effect as above.

This works fine for any website using affiliate links, that includes Wordpress. I use this method to keep the number of plugins I install down to a minimum.

Hope it is of some use.

So you’ve installed Wordpress, chosen or tweaked a template design, written that amazing original content that users will want to flock to your site to read, then your done, right?  NO, you have only just started.  Wordpress is pretty impressive “straight out of the box” for seo friendliness but still needs some tweaks to get the best out of it, especially with regards to that thawny issue of duplicate content.  Lucky for you Joost de Valk (a favourite blogger of mine) has written a very comprehensive guide including which plugins may/will help you with your quest for SEO supremacy, find the definitive guide to Wordpress SEO here

Enjoy

While adding a few test categories and posts to the website so that we have something to work on when changing the css and layout files, we quickly noticed that as standard, wordpress shows all the sub-category posts when you have clicked on the parent category, something that we didn’t want.  For example, clicking on the parent category “where to stay” showed the post under “where to stay” and all the posts from all the sub-categories, such as cottages, parks, hotelsetc all in one list.

Searching the web for a solution quickly came up trumps with a template trick, all thats needed is a couple of lines added to your archive.php or category.php pages.  Instead of copying someone elses work visit http://lonewolf-online.net/computers/knowledgebase/wordpress-not-show-posts-of-subcategory for an excellent guide.

There is quite a lot of talk around hiding, redirecting or cloaking affiliate links at the moment and if it is a good or bad idea from an SEO, will I get penalised by google perspective.

What we mean is turning a www.merchantwebsite.co.uk/en/category?aid=1234432234 link into www.yourwebsite.co.uk/product

Reasons for doing this are, visitors are more likely to click the link if it is pointing to your domain name instead of somebody elses, it looks more tidy and is easier to remember.

There are quite a few ways of doing this but my favourite is via htaccess

add the following line to your .htaccess file 

Redirect 301 /productname http://www.affiliatewebsite.com/?aid=32134

in the above example www.yourwebsite.co.uk/productname will redirect to www.affiliatewebsite.com?aid=32134

How simple is that and all updateable from one file.
 

So should we develop the site from scratch or use a CMS?  Quite frankly it has been an easy question to answer this time round.  The time it has taken to develop the backend of a new website and design the layout previously has been too time consuming.  Although I can script ok in PHP and am familiar with Mysql I’m not the fastest nor am I any cop at design to be honest so it has been an easy option to decide to use a CMS (Content Management System), but which one? Open Source CMS is worth a look for ideas.

There are many CMS open source scripts available, Joomla and Drupal being quite popular but one that I have been paying some serious attention to is Modx which I think is brilliant, if you haven’t heard of this CMS before visit their website, it is well worth considering it for a future project.  Although I think Modx is brilliant, I have actually chosen to use Wordpress.  But thats a Blogging tool I hear you cry, yes that’s true but with the use of certain plugins and a good theme Wordpress works very well as a CMS and many affiliates have utilised it for this very purpose, ukoffer springing first to mind as an example.

One of the other reasons that I have chosen Wordpress is a theme (or selection of themes) that I stumbled upon by Brian Gardner at revolutiontheme The magazine theme was exactly the kind of layout I was looking for so what would be the point in spending valuable time designing and developing a theme from scratch when one is already available and easily customisable if you know a little about css, html and php?

So we now have a home for the new website and a place to host it. Bargain