Following on from my previous post about my AW stats for 2008 I’ve been looking at my AW stats for 2009.
I’ll go straight into listing my top 5 (number of sales):
1. Buyagift.co.uk – 771 sales
2. Getting Personal – 192 sales
3. Play.com – 146 sales
4. Activity Superstore – 116 sales
5. Red Letter Days – 18 sales
As you can see Buyagift.com are still my top selling merchant, with the total top 5 selling almost 200 more items than the previous year, Play.com is in at number 3 but because of their silly commission rates the total commission is less than Red Letter Days, in fact Activity Superstore generated 1500% more commission than Play.com 
It is a bit disappointing to generate £23k in sales and not even receive 1% in commission, with using Easy Content Units I always include Play.com as I think even pennies is better than no sales, but very frustrating when you can sell a TV on amazon and get around £20 commission and the same at Play brings you £2.
I’m not sure if I am too happy with my 2009 affiliate marketing, in terms of commission I would have liked more but then I think that comes with the more you make the more you want to make, I want this to give me a full time income, November and December generates more than my day job it’s just the rest of the year I need to get sorted, I feel I’ve learned a lot in 2009 as I’ve actually made a bit more effort to and things can only get better
If, like me, you have a restriction on the amount of SQL databases you can have on your hosting then this is a little tip that I had trouble finding out when I wanted to create more Wordpress sites.
I have a restriction of 15 databases with my 1&1 hosting account, I started to look around for a new host but didn’t really fancy moving all my domains as it would be a bit of a nightmare, so this is the solution.
In your wp-config.php file you can change the prefix of the tables that are created, the default is ‘wp_’ so you can change this to anything else, for example ‘ps_’ or ’sq_’, this will enable multiple installs of wordpress on one database.
As I’ve said before I don’t really pay too much attention to stats or which sites are making what, I really should as then I’ll know if it really is worth promoting some sites or not, whereas now all I worry about is the overall profit of my sites and while that is more than my PPC cost I don’t get too fussed.
Anyway, I was looking at my AW stats for the year and thought I’d look back to see what it was last year, so my top 5 top selling merchants for Jan08 to Dec08 were…..
1. Buyagift.co.uk – 1031 sales
2. Virgin Experience Days – 9 sales
3. Iwantoneofthose.com – 6 sales
4. Brown Bag Clothing – 3 sales
5. Getting Personal – 2 sales
As you can see it’s heavily in the favour of Buyagift.com, in 2009 this has dramatically changed and I’ll do a post after Dec 31st to show how it has changed because of the implementation of Easy Content Units in my sites.
My income in 2008 didn’t just arrive from AW but it even shocked me to see how much of my income came from Buyagift.com
I received this today from Buyagift so thanks to Graham, Dan and everyone else at Buyagift!!
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I’ve promoted buyagift since I first started in affiliate marketing, and it’s things like this that makes me continue to promote them, and now I have my own blog I can thank them publicly
Now to find a longer straw!
I started to outsource my content writing as quite frankly I am no good at it, I found a great content writer who advertised on the A4U forum and they have written some great content for me, I’ve even found myself enjoying reading some of the content about subjects you never thought could be interesting. I even believe some of this content is the reason why some of my sites rank as well as they do.
Sometimes i’m after content to be written a bit quicker, I can be impatient at times, so I took a look over at digitalpoint for some content writers, advertising for people with a good grasp of English, I’d get plenty of messages from people willing to do the job and the rates were silly, so I gave some a go.
Now there’s a big difference between understanding English and writing in English it seems, they can write English words but cannot make it flow in English very well, “The hat he wears is blue. The blue hat can be worn on the head”, the sctructure of their writing seems to be a lot of sentences put together to form some content.
There are also some very good writers on digitalpoint, I think it just takes a bit of trial and error to find the good ones, but given the choice of paying $4/100 words(ok) over £15/500 words(perfect) I’d rather pay more every time.
I set this site up for two reasons really, 1. I love the show and thought it’d be good to have quotes from the show in one place, and 2. as a bit of an SEO play about.
The site is The Inbetweeners, if you are not aware of The Inbetweeners then part of the description from the Channel 4 website is: “The Inbetweeners follows four friends as they navigate the minefield of the Comprehensive education with their hormones at full blast. There’s vomit, offensive language, and a trip to Thorpe Park.”
So mainly I was looking to see how well it could rank, I never did any link building or anything else for the site, just the normal submit URLs to Google and Yahoo and within the first week the site was ranking page one of Google for the main terms I wanted which were ‘Inbetweeners’ and ‘Inbetweeners Quotes’, before long it was ranking number one for ‘Inbetweeners Quotes’ and still is, both on Google and Yahoo.
The site gets on average about 100 uniques a day, i’d say about 75% of those come from the keyword ‘inbetweeners quotes’, there isn’t much you can sell to do with the show other than DVDs so I just put up links to the DVD at Amazon and play.com, to date it has sold around 20 DVDs so at least it’s paid for itself.
To make the first blog post look less lonely I’m going to write about a niche site I made last year just before Christmas.
It didn’t make a fortune but it was some nice pocket money, the brand is in the domain name which was a bit risky but I didn’t realise about brand domains until earlier this year, now I avoid them like the plague!
The site in question is Philips Arcitec which is an electric shaver for men and I thought it would sell well being near to Christmas, girlfriends and wives buying these for their man and I was very pleased with the results from it.
I created the site in photoshop then chopped it up and saved as html, as you do, and added price comparison tables manually, which I was updating almost daily with the Amazon price changing constantly, very annoying! (Thank god for ECU!) I started promoting the site using Google adwords and then it started ranking ok and sat at number three in Google behind Philips and Amazon (I’ve just checked now at it’s currently number one, no wonder I sold one this week!) The site is now actually made using a css/xhtml template and using Easy Content Units for the price comparison, makes life a whole lot easier.
So as you can see, for the period of Sept – Dec 08 the site made £534.14 not amazing but nice for just one niche site.
As the standard complimentary blog post was titled Hello World! I thought i’d start with that as it is the first post on my own personal blog.
Why have I started a blog? Well everyone else seems to have one so I thought why not, sometimes I get excited and want to tell someone about it so this may be my outlet to do that, I can’t promise to give any valuable information as I just do what I do and things happen and I don’t always know why. This is mainly related to my affiliate marketing activities, for example having sites that seem to rank top in google and others that don’t and not being able to pinpoint why this has happened.
I can’t remember too much about exactly how I got into affiliate marketing but it must have been about 7/8 years ago when I first came across it, I had bought one of those local county information portals and was looking of ways to make money from it and that must have been when it started, I remember the first sale coming through a friend buying from ASOS, I think it was about a pound commission but it still felt good.
Despite that I didn’t really do much more with affiliate marketing for a few years, my first proper site was selling Little Britain Dolls when I found out they were going to be a big Christmas seller, I registered littlebritaindolls.co.uk and the .com, put up a simple one page site and linked into IWOOT, If I remember correctly I made £115 that christmas selling the dolls and other Little Britain merchandise, from then I was hooked, it took a while for me to stumble across something else to promote though but these days ideas are never ending and now I have more domains than I can cope with, just like any other Affiliate I expect.