Affiliate Mum

It was during December 2008 that my world changed forever.  Somehow, I stumbled upon the world of affiliate marketing and a 100watt lightbulb went off in my head.  All of a sudden I realised there was a great opportunity in front of me to create the kind of lifestyle that I desired, without commuting into the city and working long hours for somebody else.

Once I discovered the business of affiliate marketing, the learning process began.  I had never developed a website and new next to nothing about marketing.  Thankfully I also discovered the wonderful resource that is Affiliates4U and the long hours in front of my laptop began.

Right now I’m feeling incredibly proud of myself. Why you may ask. Well, out of nowhere I did an all-nighter last night and got my third site up right from the wordpress install through to putting some content and affiliate ads up. It’s just waiting to be indexed. How about that. I think I was inspired by the thread I’d been reading on the A4U forum. Some other newbies had posted their sites up and it made me realise that it doesn’t have to be a big hoohaa like I’ve been making it out to be. Don’t get me wrong – there’s still work to do, but it’s out there! You can probably tell – I’m dead chuffed. Also, the great thing about it is that if I can tweak the template to perfection I know that it will work well with at least 2 of my other domains in the pipeline. In theory, I could have another 2 or 3 niche sites up by the end of next week. Considering it’s taken me 3 months to get my first 2 sites up this is a huge development for me and hopefully I’ll move on in leaps and bounds, and start earning some squid.

I’ve spent a good part of today working on getting my second site out there. I’m not sure how it will get on, because it was indexed some time ago, but I didn’t have the content on there. So, I disallowed the robots for a while until I could get something more substantial done. Not sure if that was a mistake – we’ll see how it gets on in the SERPS. In the meantime, I’m going to keep adding content as the homepage is looking a little sparse. Although I think this site has real prospects, it’s given me right headache in terms of the format/structure. I’m still unsure of the best way to structure the site, but for the time being I’ll focus on content, and then perhaps at a later date tweak the post categories, widgets and ads. What I don’t want to do is waste anymore time on this specific project until I know that it’s financially viable, and I won’t know that until google puts it on the map. Watch this space.

Today has been quite a productive day so far which I’m really pleased with. Having said that, I have managed to avoid the most important item on my to do list – adding some content and launching my next site. I always seem to struggle with the last 20%. Anyway, back to the positive. Over the past few days I’ve spent a lot of time working on my soon-to-be-launched site, primarily looking at the appearance of it. Trying to make it look unique, messing around with the template, creating a logo and so on. I think it looks fantastic, and it will look even better with content and ads. I downloaded a free trial of Photoshop CS4 which I used to create a logo. I struggled to get it to do what I wanted it to do. I’ve seen what other people have created with Photoshop – it’s an incredibly powerful programme, but there’s so much to learn. That’s another one to add to my list of learning.

Back to today, I spent a lot of time reading about wordpress and how to customise my theme further using conditional tags. I then spent an absolute age applying for jobs. I wasn’t planning to look/apply for anything, I just stumbled across a couple of opportunities I thought suited me really well. Fingers crossed.

I’m conscious that this blog is and will continue to be of use to absolutely no one unless I stop rambling, but there are just a zillion things on my mind right now, namely: working on current sites, ideas for future sites, I should get a job, will I conquer the AM world, how’s little man getting on at nursery, php (did a www.w3schools.com tutorial yesterday), html, css, photoshop, theme customisation, i need a holiday, s@#t my flat has lost how much value!, blah, blah blah..

The moral of the story is this – if you’ve stumbled across my site – BOOKMARK ME, because one day soon my blog posts will be really concise and you might even learn something. You can hold me to that.

It’s Saturday.  I had a semi-productive day today.  I’m still not feeling too good which makes everything that little bit harder to do.  I seem to have a permanent headache, and looking at the laptop for extended periods just seems to aggravate it.  Anyway, I think I’m on the up although I must admit I was having a bit of a downer/bout of self-pity this week.

So, today I wanted to get lots of work done during the day.  I try to plan it around the Little Man’s afternoon nap, but he wasn’t playing ball today.  Not only did he not sleep for long in the afternoon, but he also played up in the evening as well – didn’t get to sleep until midnight.  Although I don’t really have anything to show for it right now, I do feel like I’ve achieved something today, if only clarification on how to progress with my ideas/sites.

So.  It’s Tuesday night and what have I done towards web development??  Absolutely nothing, I’m asshamed to say.  I do have a partial excuse.  Yesterday was the day that it snowed more than it’s snowed in 18 years.  I couldn’t possibly get anything done, what with all the snow and everything…

Of course I did manage to keep up with the A4U forum.  If I don’t monitor it everyday I could miss all sorts of useful information in Smingle’s thread (949 posts and counting).  Sarcasm aside, today was the day I planned to get stuff done because the Little Man normally goes to nursery, but it was closed due to the snow.  You see, the plan was to get some content written and sort out all the plugins for my first site, which is on the WordPress platform.  I managed to do a few google searches, and the tabs have been left open in firefox, eagerly waiting my attention.  WHen all’s said and done, I’m being really crap.  There’s no excuse.  Perhaps I’m not taking this seriously enough.  This is, after all, my new career.  I do feel really passionate about it.  Starting is the hardest thing.  Right.

Today I spent a lot of the researching, looking for themes, reading about aStore SEO etc etc trying to get all my ducks in a row (read: procrastinating).  Doing everything BUT what I should be doing.  Why do we behave like this?  In my case, I always seem to be on the verge of achieving something, near to a goal that I’ve set myself, but when it comes to that final leap there’s hesitation.  After being unemployed for the last two years it feels good to tell people that I’m self-employed, although I’m yet to earn a penny.  I have to be successful at this venture because the thought of being a failure terrifies me.

I created my first aStore today, but need to find out how to optimise it.  The aStore is almost  invisible to google without any supporting, unique content, so I need to work out a good site structure.  According to the google keyword tool the keyword for this site gets an average of 246,000 searches per month and has an average CPC of £0.22.  I think that’s fairly promising, and hopefully as I’ll be promoting amazon, conversions should be high.  Once I understand how adwords and PPC work, it might be a good idea to try PPC with this site.  I must say, that I don’t quite trust the volume organic searches, but I suppose the proof is in the pudding.