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!