Update

Well, I left the original post below so you could see my initial thoughts on this matter but I realized whilst swimming laps that my conclusions were probably incorrect.  I had not taken account of Clicks (Duh!) and on looking these up I found this month is running at 6,000 clicks less than last month which was a real surprise as traffic is usually on the up tick my now.  This did get me thinking though about EPNs desire to eliminate bot clicks etc.  Anyone ever wonder if they’re taking out genuine clicks as a result of their system filters?  I’m beginning to.

——————————————————————-

Here’s an interesting piece of information.  Too early yet to draw any conclusions but nevertheless a trend is starting to emerge.  Checking over my EPN stats today and comparing the period Oct 1 – Oct 23 to Nov 1 – Nov 23 shows a difference in eBay fee revenue of just £150 in favor of October but a difference in ACRUS of 3 in favor of November.  One would therefore expect earnings to be pretty similar but already November is £250 down on October and worryingly they are trending lower still as I write this.

To me this clearly demonstrates the ability that the new algo gives eBay to manipulate payments to affiliates.  A similar level of sales to previous month being judged of lower value despite an increase in ACRUS.

Hopefully this is just a blip and I’ll see an increase in earnings over the next week, however, if things remain as they trending I am currently forecasting earnings to fall more than 30% this month compared to the last.

It’s also interesting to compare earnings to November of last year when despite 80% less traffic my earnings for the whole month were approximately the same as they are today for this month.   Not sure I can conclude anything from that as it can go either way i.e. a lot of browsers v buyers (recession effect) – I feel this is most likely.  Or, my traffic is a lot less targeted than last year – seems unlikely but you never know.

I’d love to hear about your experiences so please take time to add a comment.  How are your earnings trending compared to last month?  If we can put together more data we can draw more accurate conclusions.

Testing is one thing that many of us simply do not do.  The make money online niche is so over populated that everybody has a theory and 99% of theories are unproven.  Given the level of misinformation the only way to test whether a strategy is effective or not is to try it for yourself.  Now that might be a pain but until you can find sources of information that you can trust (not at all easy) it’s the only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

To that end I conducted a test over the last three months to see once and for all how important it is to have content on your site versus a bunch of eBay/amazon/affiliate links.  This proved very illuminating and also poses somewhat of a dilemma.   How come?  Well I have proven beyond doubt that Google really doesn’t like ranking pages with little or no content.  Build links to content packed page or post and it will rank quite well.  Build links to a page or post which contains say a dozen eBay listings and it will not only affect the page negatively but your whole site.    I have several sites that have more than enough links pointing to them to rank top 10 but they are down in the hundreds.  Google appears to label it an affiliate site (despite links being cloaked) and they really don’t like them anymore.

So where’s the dilemma?  Well I’ve been building sites using wordpress and phpBay.  I can’t get them to rank in Google (without heaps of content) and I cant get them to rank that well in Yahoo (Yahoo doesn’t seem to like wordpress that much) and as for Bing (well Bing is a big improvement on Live but the jury is still out for me).  What’s fascinating is that Yahoo appears to love old style build a niche store sites with little or no content far more than wordpress phpBay.

How much more does it love them?  Massively.  I have 4 stores in particular that are plain BANS.  They have no content, were deindexed by Google more than 18 months ago, have the standard templates and yet they have multiple keywords that rank no. 1-5 and over the last 12 months they have earned over $30,000.  I have similar stores built in Wordpress and phpBay that in comparison have made approx $3,000.  That makes BANS 10 x more effective.

Can you believe that?  And there lies the dilemma.  Do you knock out sophisticated stores that take a huge investment of time and money or do you knock out stores using the standard BANS script?  I haven’t built a standard BANS store since the beginning of the year.  In hindsight that’s looking a big mistake.  The best bet?  Balance build a couple of BANS stores per month and invest the rest of your time in trying to build stuff that Google will love.

There are all sorts of caveats that I could throw at this article but I’m not going to.  You have to prove this stuff for yourself.  BANS sites still take more than 6 months to get indexed properly in Yahoo but after that they do very well if you’ve find the right niche.   They are quick to set up and if you throw them into the 3 Way Links system they will rank.  Yeah Google is going to deindex them after a few weeks but hey $30,000 is a lot of money for little to no work!

Now that was worth reading wasn’t it?

If you don’t know what a bounce rate is you want to start learning about it pretty quickly.  Bounce rate measures the amount of time a visitor to your site spends on a particular page before “bouncing off” to another page or site.  Why is it important?  Quite simply if you have a high bounce rate then you can point all the links in the world to your page but it will not rank in the Google SERPS as if the average visit time is less than 5 seconds Google will deem it is not serving content that your visitors expect to find.

As niche stores go this is not strictly true because the visitor may have found exactly what they want (e.g. an eBay item for sale) but in clicking on a link they are being taken straight to eBay and away from your site.

So, if you’re getting visitors but cannot rank for a keyword you are targeting despite pointing huge quantities of links at the page your bounce rate is likely to need addressing.  The only way to do this is to add relevant content to that page that will engage the visitor and delay the pontential clickthru to eBay.  If you can hold their attention for another 10 seconds or so then this could make a huge difference to where you rank in the SERPS.

You can measure your bounce rate accurately by installing Google analytics on your site.  This will also make a huge amount of additional information available to you from which you can learn much about what your visitors like and dislike.

Despite what you may read SEO is about quite a bit more than just link building.

So I’ve been catching up on some of the latest news and I see a whole bunch of people have received an adwords slap on their review sites and suffered from falling quality scores which begs the question does Google hate affiliates?

There have been many responses and more than a few people have pointed out that Google has it’s own affiliate network so it shouldn’t be looking to make affiliates suffer unnecessarily.  What are your thoughts on this?

For my part I don’t really get it.  If someone puts up a review site and then wants to drive traffic to it via PPC for which Google gets paid is there really a need to penalize?  If the site is crap it won’t make any money and the cpc and lack of conversion will ensure it soon disappears.  If the product is crap then you can almost always get a refund.  So what is Google up to (if anything)?

I am inclined to think that the majority of sites that have been slapped are not adhering to Googles Webmaster Guidelines.  No one ever seems to admit that their sites breach these guidelines but my own experience shows that they are enforced quite rigorously and the usual reason for receiving a slap or worse the death sentence of deindexation.

Many will have seen that Webmaster Tools was updated not too long back and quality score became a touch more transparent.  Many of my remaining BANS stores were deindexed following that update as were some of my phpBay stores.  The reason?  Well, you can never be 100% certain but almost certainly for using the 3 Way Linking System devised by Jonathan Leger.

3 Way Links was a lifesaver for me  when I first got started with BANS helping my stores into profit through improved rankings at a time when I simply couldn’t afford to undertake manual link building.   However, within webmaster guidelines it falls under paid links so I can have no complaints about my treatment from Google.  I have promoted the 3 way linking system and I will continue to do so because traffic from Yahoo and more recently Bing (since Mircosoft updated the lousy MSN search engine) still generate a tidy profit .  So maybe paid links still have their place but with Google you’re walking a tightrope.

It is a fact that we all need Google whilst they are the search engine of choice for 85% of the worlds population.  I hope the monopoly is broken soon but it doesn’t look likely.  In the meantime if you want to play in Googles yard then we need to follow the webmaster rules.  And boy it is worth it.  One of the few sites I had with a top 10 Google ranking for it’s chosen keywords has subsequently suffered an 80% drop in earnings over the last 6 weeks and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.

I’m sick of super affiliates aren’t you?  This year the market is even more saturated with product launches than ever.  They’re bigger, better and more informative (?) than ever before.  But isn’t it interesting to note what a little club has  been created by self serving “gurus”.  Over the years super affiliates have got to know one another via internet marketing conferences which they regularly attend or speak at.  Because most made their money when things were easy they have built massive lists of followers.  As a result of this they discovered the power of the joint venture which works like this.

I’ll give you an advance copy of my latest product which you can review and promote to your list.  We’ll hype it with free videos, limited availability and we’ll all tell everyone how fantastic it is.  Then we launch make a thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in a week and then we move on to the next.

With this simple strategy these guys have cornered the market and because they can afford to give away so much stuff, most of which purchasers never use anyway (regardless of value) they have cut thousands of potentially up and coming internet marketers out of the loop.

Now of itself I have no problem with this as it is good business.  However, there are some disgraceful practices starting to emerge off the back of this strategy.  My purchase of (p&p only) PPC Classroom resulted in a phone call from them suggesting that to be successful I had to leverage my credit card (referred to as free money) to fund my Adword budget and pay advanced coaching fees, in my view, a guaranteed way for many to increase their debt burden rather than gain relief from it.

My other gripe is the never ending boasts of many of these guys that this system will make you thousands of dollars  a week after a few hours work and you just follow a step by step process.  My experience is that there are always plenty of steps missing.  They tell you WHAT to do but not HOW to do it.  Or, the HOW  uses one of there’s or there buddies other products which holds a regular subscripton or you need to employ a team of outsourcers to do all the work.

I have checked out a few super affiliate products but mostly I have asked for a refund for the reasons stated above.   My business model mainly focuses around mini sites.  The more I build the more money I make.  It’s simple, it’s hard and at times boring work but by the end of my second year in this business I reckon I’ll be making $10,000 – $15,000 per month which is way more that I earned in any job.  This is the only business I know  where anyone prepared to do the work can succeed for an investment of just a few bucks a month.

If you’ve got money to burn then rather than buying super affiliate products outsource as much of your work as possible.  I currently outsource about $1,000 of work per month.  I hope to ramp that figure up considerably by the end of the year.  In a plan I was knocking around recently I figured if I outsource $5,000 per month of work I could add 120 qaulity mini  sites per annum to my  portfolio.  After 12 months each of those sites should be capable of generating $500 per month.  Some will generate less some more but I still reckon that’s $60,000 per month in income and all without buying a single super affilliate product.

That’s a pretty tempting prospect don’t you think?