My two new 2010 affiliate sites are doing OK I think – though I would like to see them driving more traffic and ideally more conversions! (wouldn’t we all?!)  They are both getting about 10 uniques a day at the moment, and converting at about 1% despite probably about 50% extremely highly targeted traffic.

To improve this I spent a while looking at the visitors journey on both sites – and asked simple questions like “would I actually click that?”.  In many cases I was failing massively – so some work was needed.  Some of this focussed on adding images and giving product pages the feel of an online store – to try and get rid of the blog atmosphere.

Once I had done this it seemed that the next logical step would be to add some more content – as I hadn’t updated this for a couple of weeks.  I have previously tried loads of different approaches to this – obviously trying to automate as much as possible.  Returning to using a CSV to Post plug-in for WordPress, I decided I would try to do the whole layout for a product page in Excel first and have this all import – so that nothing was left for me to do once it was in WordPress.  In practice this turned out incredibly well and I will probably put up a whole post on this.  But certainly check out the plugin as its a great timesaver – especially if your any good with Excel!

Along side this I have been persevering with back links as well as developing my web design skills.  I have built a couple of sites for small businesses locally – so am planning to turn this into a small business – watch this space for my portfolio site!

I spent the first two weeks of January adding content in the form of product pages and exercise articles – and spending some time doing link exchanges, forum posting and article writing.  The site got indexed within about a day of me putting it up initially – and last week it made about 4 sales, the total commission from these is about £5.  So quite a small start, but I was happy that it was getting picked up for long tail searches – as currently it only appears as number 7 on the first page for its main keyword.

This brings me onto the issue of it being optimised for a misspelling – when you google the misspelling, the big G tries to correct your mistake and even inserts two results for the correct spelling above the rest of the results – so even if I continue to link build/add content then the best I can hope for is effectively number 3.  A silly oversight really – and one that I could have avoided – I posted about this about a week ago on the A4U forums and the consensus is really that optimising sites for misspellings is a pointless activity as Google will only get better at correcting them.

So I will continue to add to the site and get it a few more links, then my plan is to leave it a while and see how it does.  As the experience in terms of ranking etc. will be valuable.  I am now on the search for a new niche to focus my main energy on – preferably one that I stand a chance of getting to number 1 for!

I have been aware of affiliate marketing for about 6 months and have spent that time reading a fair bit and doing some experimentation.  I think it is fair to say that the majority of the experimentation has not been successful – but I have certainly learnt a lot!  Which brings me to this blog – which I am hoping will help others in the same situation as me – by letting us all learn from my mistakes.

Over the last 6 months I have bought a few domains, toyed with atomic niches, PPC and much larger sites – learnt a lot more about SEO that I knew before and realised that I still don’t know a lot.  Perhaps the most important thing I have learnt is that no matter how much you read on forums etc. the only way that it goes in and that you really start to understand anything is when you try it.  So here is 2010 and I am starting a new blog and giving this whole thing a proper go.

I am aiming to update this a few times a week and let you know how I am doing with various sites I am planning – also thinking I might do a case study or two as I have found these a really valuable learning tool and would be great to get your feedback – so please leave comments!

Hope you all have a great start to 2010, check back soon!