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The Michael Jackson effect and affiliates

James — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 10:49:11 +0000

The passing of Michael Jackson was a sad moment in the history of the world and as a as a result of his untimely passing and huge media coverage, there were many reports of the increased traffic on the social networks and sites devoted to the King of Pop. Some reportedly could not cope with these increased traffic levels.

I thought I would use this post to show you just how much an increase in traffic was experienced, from my little corner of the affiliate world. A bit of background first – I set up a small “landing page” style site, with no content except for the main page (and of course the standard pages like a privacy policy and contact details), about 4 months ago. The sites primary aim was to sell Michael Jackson tickets for his upcoming tour of the UK at the 02 arena. I had about 3 auctions listed on the front page with links to tickets on eBay, a popular scalping location for his tickets (some went as high as £500 for a ticket). I had undertaken relatively little promotion on the site except for the some social submissions – it was intended as a PPC experiment. Subsequent to the experiment, I left the site untouched and it received a little attention from Google and the other search engines, with an average of about one visitor a day, with it peaking at about three per day. There were two key events where traffic to spiked – the first being the death of Michael Jackson and the second being the funeral, with the funeral providing a greater influx of visitors. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so below you can see the Google Analytics graph for a period of a month.

As can be seen above, traffic levels increased by around 2000% around the time of his death and about 4000% around the time of the funeral. Admittedly these are not astounding levels, but the increases are phenomenal.

The lesson learnt? As an affiliate marketer, always be on the lookout for (ethical and moral) opportunities to increase traffic and look for niches (obviously profiting from someone’s death does not fall into this category, but I had not set out to do that).

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

Affiliate Workspaces and more

James — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:28:12 +0000

Following on from my previous post about my affiliate workspace, I thought I’d do a follow-up with some other workspaces which inspired me. I’ll also do another follow-up shortly with some more details of my workspace and also some better shots. So without further ado, here are some other workspaces (if you find any more, please leave a comment!

Dave Pit’s setup

Darren Rowse of Problogger fame 1, 2 and Darren’s own workspace video

Time for Blogging setup (loads of links from there)

Productivity 501 setup

Lifehacker has a whole series of featured workspaces

Affiliate Tip workspace

Zac Johnson

Massive thread on WickedFire

Hope you enjoy them as much as I did, let me know if you find any more great workspaces!

My Home Office setup a.k.a my affiliate workspace

James — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:14:29 +0000

I stumbled across Dave Pitlyuk site the other day and was inspired by both his web site and associated sites, as well as his home office post, so I decided I’d take up his tag offer and show off my affiliate/blogger workspace. So without further ado, I present my workspace.

Front shot (click for larger version)

This is a front-on shot, which contains my 23-inch Dell LCD, running at 1920×1080 (full 1080p) resolution. I also have a Cisco VOIP phone, which I use for incoming calls. A standard Microsoft mouse and keyboard combo complete the picture (there is also an Axis IP network camera, temporarily placed on the left while I find a good spot for it).

What makes it all happen (click for larger version)

This is what drives everything, it’s a Core 2 Duo E6300 (quite old these days) running 4 gigs of RAM. I’ve got a 500 gig hard drive in there (with another 1.5tb on the home server). This is where most of the work gets done, however I also have a Dell XPS Inspiron M1330 in crimson red, running 2 gigs of RAM for when I’m in need of getting some work done on the couch or on the road. Both machines are still running Windows XP, I skipped Vista and am waiting for Windows 7.

Any comments? Let me know!

Tools for automation

James — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:06:15 +0000

One never forgets the excitement of building your first few sites and the adrenaline rush when you log into your affiliate dashboard and see your first commissions. This excitement and adrenaline drives you forward into adding more content and building more sites. However, the key to driving your affiliate success forward is automation. Building and managing sites, keywords and campaigns and tracking your statistics is key to becoming a more successful affiliate.

For the EPN’ers out there, I use a combination of scripts, plugins and Linode VPS’ (which give me root access) to manage my eBay sites. Setting up a new Wordpress site with PhyBay Pro takes approximately 15 minutes, with the content and link-building outsourced I can quickly attract visitors through organic search.

For affiliates who use other networks with Pay-per-Click (PPC), a self-hosted Prosper installation provides everything you should need in terms of tracking and statistics. For those that prefer an outsource pay solution, there is Tracking202 Pro which should meet your needs for an outsourced solution.

There are of course many other tools out there, some of which I will be covering in future writing, such a keyword tools (Google Adwords Tool is great) and the iMacros plugin for Firefox, which is invaluable in the long-run.

Must have Firefox extensions for affiliate marketers

James — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:19:31 +0000

Firefox is a great tool for affiliate marketers, which can be made even more useful through the use of these must-have extensions.

1. Web deveveloper

The Web Developer extension adds some very useful tools to your Firefox browser window, including cookie information and other validation menus. I find the CSS tools most useful for troubleshooting and coding CSS.

2. SEOQuake

Absolutely essential, this extension adds useful SEO information to your browser, such as pagerank, incoming links and allows you to save them for comparison purposes.

3. Screen Grab

This extension allows you to easily capture parts of the Firefox screen. I find it exceptionally useful for grabbing excerpts to use in posts and affiliate sites.

4. Alexa Sparky

Yes, Alexa can make something useful. Alexa Sparky allows you to track trends and compare the current sites reach and rank.

5. Colorzilla

Exceptionally simple plugin that allows you to grab colors from the current page, browse colors and also measure distances – time-saving extension.

If you are not already using Firefox, I highly recommend grabbing a copy.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!