Merry Christmas All!

Just a quick post as its christmas day and I’m feeling rather full after demolishing an excellent xmas dinner prepared by my Dad (his first time…usually Mummy Boyd adopts the chef role, was dang good though).

I’ve got a bunch of Google Adwords Promo Codes that credit your account with a £50 free spend. These codes will only work on accounts that are 14days old or less, so generally for newbies to either affiliate marketing or PPC in general. Adwords is what I would class as advanced affiliate marketing (once you master it there’s serious dosh to be made!). Many are scared to give it a try after hearing the many horror stories floating around. I first tried it around a year ago and I’ve not looked back. Not only can it allow you to make money on a site instantly, its actually incredidbly good fun and really rewarding when it pays off.

Theres only one way to learn and thats to give it a shot. What better way to do that than with Google’s moolah!?

Here are the codes, they expire 31-12-2009 so use them up quickly, feel free to pass them onto anyone who can make good use of them. Sell them on ebay and ill hunt you down and probably give you a stern talking to, so watch out!

85PP-U2EL-6RVH-482K-QHA
85PP-UFTA-LDCT-CHEV-BGJ
85PP-UVP6-UXG8-2Z49-Q3J
85PP-TPJU-XH5E-39FZ-9PJ
85PP-U4ZP-9PCB-RMUD-4Y2
85PP-UJG9-AU5L-9DFJ-6FJ
85PP-TSKQ-AZX5-R7K4-T4S
85PP-U7K9-LLDP-KS8N-G2S
85PP-UMPE-T2R9-JBA2-972
85PP-V2PG-E83E-SRZH-D3S
85PP-TV4G-U4TP-L89L-8S2
85PP-UAQF-MW8Y-PNEB-4YJ

You can only use one per account so dont try and add them all! If you are a newbie and feel like giving it a try but dont know where to start feel free to add me on msn and I’ll give you a few pointers! If you use a code can you comment to let me know so I can score it off so others dont waste their time entering it

Merry Xmas,

Mark

Wordpress has become the weapon of choice for the majority of affiliates, due to its ease of use and customisability. As the use of wordpress increases, so does the need for plugins to meet the needs of the affiliate world. This post will detail a few of the plugins I’d recommend using on your affiliate sites.

1. All In One SEO by Michael Torbert
This plugin allows you to manually define the Title, Description and Keyword tags (all of which are basic SEO practice) while adding a post or page.

All In One SEO Pack

These tags are part of the basic on page SEO that seems to get overlooked by so many sites, so installing this plugin will remind you to populate these tags for every page. Once you have installed the plugin, goto Settings > All In One SEO and define the tags for your homepage.

2. Simple Link Cloaker by Steve Johnson
I use this plugin to cloak affiliate links and also to manage my outgoing links. In order to increase my click through rates, I find its important to cloak affiliate links. Which of the following links would you be more inclined to click while hovering over a “Buy Now” button?

http://www.markboyd.co.uk/dvd-rental
or
http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=2605&awinaffid=76861&clickref=&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lovefilm.com%2Fdvd-rental%2F

I personally would be more likely to click the first link, therefore I tend to cloak my affiliate links. Simply install the plugin, then when you’d like to cloak a link, copy the long affiliate link into the plugin settings page then define what you’d like the link to be cloaked as. Simples!

3. WP-Ads by Nick Brady
This plugin is a godsend.  This is the bee knees of ad management plugins. Its super simple to use, you simple create a “zone” and then define banners for that zone. These banners will then rotate evenly unless you specify another weighting. You can then copy a line of code into your wordpress templates or into a page or post and thats where the zone’s banners will be displayed. If you take a look @ Nrbet.com (a site I’ve neglected somewhat!) you can see this plugin at work. There are five zones defined on nrbet: the header 468×60 banner space and the four 125×125 banner spaces. WP-Ads also allows me to monitor banner impressions, which is particularly useful if you sell ad space by x amount of impressions.

4. SEO Friendly Images by Vladimir Prelovac
Simple yet effective plugin that defines your image alt tags for you based on your posts title or the image file name. This saves you having to define the alt tag for every image you include in your posts/pages.

5. Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachold
This nifty little plugin automatically creates an XML Sitemap whenever you update your blog and it also pings the search engines to let them know of the changes.

6. Robots Meta by Yoost de Valk
A very handy plugin from the King of Wordpress Joost de Valk. I use this plugin to define which pages I dont want Google to index, such as login page, privacy policy, terms and conditions and contact us pages. With this plugin installed you simply choose if you’d like the page to be indexed or not and also if you’d like google to follow the links on the page or not.

7. Custom Post Templates by Simon Wheatley
Not necessarily relevant for affiliate sites, but its a plugin that has saved me pulling my hair out at many times in the past. Its easy enough to create custom page templates, but wordpress havent made it as easy to create custom post templates and thats where this plugin comes in. Create templates in the same way you would for a custom page template, then simply choose your template of choice on the New Post page. Voila!

8. Link A Dink
Again, this isnt a necessity for affiliate sites, but I like it, so I’m sharing it! The Link-A-Dink plugin allows you to create a list of “buzz words” and if any of those words are mentioned anywhere on your blog they are replaced with a text link. For example I could setup this blog so that anytime I mention the phrase “the forums” it would add a link to Affiliates4u.

9. Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi
Every site should have a contact form (apart from this one… I’ll get around to that one day!) and the Contact Form 7 plugin couldnt make it any simpler.

10. Smart Youtube by Vladimir Prelovac
If you want to embed youtube videos into your posts, then this plugin is for you. All you have to do is copy the URL of the youtube into your post and add the letter v – e.g. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3UL_mVHHI.

Hopefully you will have now discovered one or two new plugins worth using on your sites! I’d really love to hear your comments and more importantly, which plugins you use that I havent mentioned!

It’s been over two months since my last post, ridiculous huh? Well, I’ve been super busy since the end of September when I started my fourth year of my Management with Marketing course at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. I’ve had a 2500 word coursework due in pretty much everyweek. Add that to the affiliate stuff I’ve got going on and the seo consultancy work I’m doing and it doesnt leave much time for blog posts. Fortunately I’ve got my last coursework to be in next week, then I’m free for a few weeks breather of christmas, woohoo! I’ve decided one way to keep my blog up to date that I can implement while I’m dang busy is…. (Drum Roll Please!)…. Affiliate Quick Tips™! Basically quick tips that are hopefully useful for newbies to help them progress in affiliate marketing. I’ve noticed a lot of newbies popping up on the forums, which is great for the industry. I wouldnt have got to where I am today if I hadnt received help from experienced affiliates, so hopefully the quicktips can help out the newbies of 2009/2010!

OK, first of the Affiliate Quick Tips™ is the use of the allintitle syntax on google search.

Google has lots of little tricks you can use to get more from their search results, in the post I’ll explain the use of allintitle.

When you come up with any idea, one of the first things you should do (even before domain research) is analyse the competition in the market. If the competition is strong, it may not be worth your time focussing on that niche. If the competition is weak, excellent, you’ve found a niche worth targeting and you can move onto your domain research.

One way to calculate how many sites are going to be up against you in the SERPs is to use the allintitle search function. This function will show you exactly how many websites in the good index have the words you’ve searched for in their title tags. The title tag on a page is a key factor in the on-site SEO, so its important to include your targeted keyword in the tag. Here are a few examples of different allintitle searches and as you can see the competition varies somewhat:

allintitle:car insurance – 11.8m webpages have the words car and insurance in their title tag

allintitle:gavin and stacey dvd – 7,040 webpages have the words gavin, and, stacey and dvd in their title tag

allintitle:233LGS – 567 webpages have the word 233LGS in their title tag

So, as you can see the competition is ridiculous for car insurance, its pretty strong for gavin and stacey dvd and its pretty weak for 233LGS. But, what is 233LGS I hear you ask? Its the model number for a £95 watch available at Goldsmiths and various other merchants and the domain name 233LGS.co.uk is available. With commission starting at 10% at Goldsmiths I think it’d be worth a shot!

So, the next time you’re researching your niche market, give allintitle a whirl and let me know how you get on!

I’ve been using Adwords since the beginning of this year and it’s safe to say I’m addicted. While I was reading the PPC Dos and Don’ts post on Affiliate Doctors I noticed that Shane had recommended using Adwords Dynamic Insertion tool. This was something that I hadn’t came across so far this year in my time with Adwords so I decided to look into it further as it sounded pretty dang handy! Having played about with it I’ve become aware of its huge potential to increase your CTR.

So, what does it do? Basically it allows you to have the keyword that has triggered the ad in your ad’s title, ad text or display URL. When you create an ad for adwords you should always be aiming to get as much of the ad bolded as possible to help increase your CTR. The more chance of your ad standing out from the rest the better. If I do a Google search for Contents Insurance, the following three ads show up in the top positions.

As you can see, any mentions of “Contents” or “Insurance” have been bolded. So why is this relevant? Well, imagine you are running a campaign that has many keywords assigned to it, you would have to create a lot of ad groups to have an ad tailored to each keyword (to ensure your title gets bolded as it contains the search term), which would take a lot of time and would be pretty tedious!

So, this is where the dynamic keyword insertion comes in useful. When you are creating your ad, insert {Keyword:Default} into the ad title, ad text or display URL. Replace the word Default with the text that you would like to appear if the users search term is too long. So if I was creating an ad for my blog I would insert {Keyword:Mark Boyd’s Blog}. It is important to use a capital at the start of Keyword as this will capitalise each word for your ad text (if you want it to do that!).

So here’s an example. I have set up an ad for the purpose of this post using {Keyword:Mark Boyd’s Blog} in the ad title and at the end of the URL. I then set up a few exact match keywords… [mark boyd is ace], [i love mark boyd] and [wheres mark boyd]. Googling any of these terms now shows the keyword that triggered the ad as the ad title and at the end of the url…

In a nutshell, its a cracking tool, have a think about how it can help you increase your CTR!

Back in early June I was lucky enough to be able to attend Ex-Dragon InvestorDoug Richard’s School for Startups event at Robert Gordon University. The day was packed with useful and interesting info for business startups and I was lucky enough to get some one on one time with Doug at the end of the seminar.

Doug’s seminars are still going strong and are now going to be streamed live on the net. This is just a quick post to point out that his first streamed seminar will be free to watch, so don’t miss out. It will be taking place this Friday at 6pm and you can register here for free. Let me know what you thought of the stream after the event.

I was at my Girlfriend’s parents house last week and her Uncle comes out with “Mark, you’ve not updated your blog in ages”. I didn’t even know he knew about my site! He has a point though, its been almost two months since my last post so I’ve decided to pull my finger out and get posting again.

So to start off my new round of posting I’ve decided to share my favourites tools that increase my affiliate productivity. To many of you these will be nothing new and you’ll have been using them for years, but for the newbies that read my blog, I hope this helps you out.

1. Google Keyword Tool

This is the first tool any affiliate should learn to use. It’s pretty simply to use but the information outputted can be invaluable to the success or failure of your new site. Punch in a few keyword ideas and the Keyword Tool will give you an approximate number of monthly searches. Having used this tool for a while now, I can safely say it isnt 100% accurate, however it still lets you know if a keyword is being search for in droves or not. It shows you how many searches a month a term gets globally and it also tells you how many in the UK.

2. Website Grader

This handy tool from Hubspot is very helpful for pointing out some simple SEO mistakes you’ve made. You can also use it to compare your site with your competitors’.

3. Statcounter

I understand that majority of affiliates tend to use Google Analytics, but I’ve always preferred Statcounter, it can give you all the information you need to monitor the success of your Website or PPC campaign.

4. Tweetdock.com

This is actually my website, so stand by for a shameless plug! Tweetdock allows you to set up automated Twitter advertising campaigns based on what people are talking about. Imagine you have a site about bananas (its just an example, dont make a site about bananas!), you can setup tweetdock to have your twitter account @ reply anyone on twitter who says the words “banana” or “bananas”. You can also geo-target and only message people within a certain radius of a city. So you might own a coffee shop in London, you can use Tweetdock to message anyone who mentions “coffee” within 20 miles of London. The possibilities are endless, you just need to get creative! Sign up for a week’s free trial now.

5. Easy Content Units

This should probably have been number one on the list as it solves a problem that has caused me nightmares for years. If you want to provide a price comparison on your website but don’t have the technical know-how, this is the product for you. ECU offer a free account which means you can make as many price comparisons as you like but 20% of the clicks will go through their affiliate link instead of yours. If that’s not your thing, you can pay £19.99 + VAT per month and get 100% of the clicks going through your affiliate link. The prices are taken from the merchants data feeds so you simply create the unit and leave it, no need to manually update the prices. I cant recommend their service enough and they have a friendly team behind them that are constantly looking to improve the product based on customers feedback.

Of course there are many more tools worth using, but these five stick out in my mind as increasing my productivity. Feel free to comment with your favourite tools.

A lot of affiliate marketers will tell you that to succeed you need to find a good niche. Others will tell you that you’d be better off going down the generic route. I’m a fan of both methods. I get a buzz out of creating small niche sites and leaving them to tick away making a bit of money each month and I also love making sites that I have to work a little harder at but reap better rewards.

For someone who’s just starting out in Affiliate Marketing I feel that going down the niche route to begin with is a good plan. So the first step is to find the products to promote, which isnt as easy as it may sound. So the purpose of this post is to point out some obvious ways to do some idea generation for niche sites.

Here are some questions worth asking yourself if you’re stuck for ideas;

What products are about to be released?
A good example of an answer to this question is the Rubik’s 360. I noticed a few weeks before it was due to be released that it was causing quite a stir and a bunch of people were already talking about the sort of sales figures it is likely to achieve (500,000 units by Xmas!), so I jumped on the bandwagon and created a PPC Campaign. I would have also created a small site around the product had I had the time.

What’s popular at the moment?
Popular products are easy to sell, well… because they are popular. However, the bad thing about popular products is the amount of competitors. If you’re smart and think outside the box you can still do very well.

What have you just purchased?
This is the way I find most of my niche ideas. Whenever I buy something I go straight to the Google Keyword Tool and punch in some keywords to see if its something many people are searching for.

What are your friends talking about?
If your friends are talking about a certain product, they’re obviously happy with it (or they could be upset with it!) and therefore it could be a product worth promoting.

What have you noticed in the Newspapers/Magazines?
This is an excellent method for finding products that are not yet released, which hopefully means there are still some cracking domains available for the product. Get you hands on some gadget magazines and read up on the best products.

What have you been looking for yourself?
The latest site that I’m working on is 5m HDMI Cable. Its currently under development but with a few hours work I’ll have it ready to start making some money. It won’t make so much money I’ll never need to work again, but it cost me just £5 to buy the domain and just a few hours work to get it going, so I’ll be happy if it makes even just £30 a month. I came across this site idea because I was in need of a long hdmi cable (that reminds me, I’ve also got Long HDMI Cable to develop!) and after a bit of research on the keyword tool I found that the exact phrase “5m HDMI Cable” was being searched for 1000 times per month and because the domain was available I decided to go for it. I’ll post again in a month or two to let you know how its going!

What do you love talking/writing about?
One of the most time consuming things in Affiliate Marketing is content writing. If you can find a niche that you love writing about then you’re onto a winner (assuming its based around a product that others will be searching for!).

So that’s just a few questions that might help you along your way. They are ridiculously obvious but hopefully they will help you find some good ideas.

Once you’ve got a list of ideas, check to see if they are being searched for using GKT. If they are, fantastic! If not, not to worry, just move on to another idea.

Good Luck on your quest for fantastic ideas! If you have any other ways of finding great ideas, Id be happy to hear them!

Just a quick post today…

Fraser Edwards from RedWine.co.uk and WhiteWine.co.uk was kind enough to send over a couple of bottles of wine.

Just wanted to say thanks to Fraser for such a kind gesture! If you’re a wine drinker then head over to Red Wine or White Wine.

First off, Id like to point out that I dont proclaim to be a PPC expert in any way shape or form. I started dabbling in PPC on the 1st of January 2009. It was a new year, so I thought Id try out PPC, which Id heard so much about but hadnt had the money (or balls!) to try out.

So I got to it, within the first month Id sold over £90,000 worth of products for Amazon. I concentrated just on promoting amazon products. The reason for this is pretty simple, they offer great commission on electronics and people just  love amazon so it tends to convert very well. The point of this post isnt to tell you about my methods (I plan to post about them shortly though) but to educate newcomers to PPC of the benefits of using negative keywords.

When you set up an ad campaign in adwords, you define which keywords you’d like to target. There are various ways you can define your keywords such as Exact Match, Broad Match, Phrase and so on. For more information on the various types please see the Basic PPC Tutorial.

I use negative keywords to keep an ad campaign under control! I tend to focus on promoting electronics via amazon. My goal is to target searchers that are ready to buy the product. I don’t want searchers who are still in the research stage of the buying cycle. Therefore it is important to rule out such searchers using negative keywords.

What are negative keywords I hear you ask? Basically, if you add negative keywords to your adgroup, your ad will not show for users that have used that word in their search term. Imagine you are selling a television, lets for examples sake call it the “Boyd 301286″. Lets also say hypothetically its quite an expensive television and to get a decent ad position on google youre going to have to pay around 40p a click for the privilege.

OK so the scene is set, you’re promoting a Boyd 301286 television at Amazon that costs you around 40p a click on adwords. Do you want to pay 40p for any of the following search term traffic?

boyd 301286 reviews
boyd 301286 from dixons
faulty boyd 301286
boyd 301286 wall mount
how to setup boyd 301286

The answer you should have screamed out there was “Of course not! What a waste of money!”. Believe me, without the correct negative keywords in place I would spend hundreds of £s a month on what I would class as useless traffic.

When I set up an ad campaign I add a big list of negative keywords that I’ve used on previous campaigns. My work is not finished though. Everyday I check my stats and add to the negative keywords collection!

The best way to keep on top of your negative keywords is to check your analytics (I use Statcounter) as regularly as you can. Particularly the recent keyword activity. You can then view a list of the keywords that searchers have used to get to your site.  Sift through this list and you will see which traffic won’t have benefitted you in anyway, you then add the negative keywords to your ad campaign.

As time goes on and the campaign matures, you will see you have to add less and less negative keywords.

Its a very simple thing to do and it could save you a lot of money. At the very worst it WILL increase your earnings per click, which is what us affiliate marketers should always be looking to do!

Heres a list of negative keywords I am currently using on a campaign that is promoting a 32 inch television that is for sale at Amazon. It should hopefully give you an idea of how it can improve my EPC.

-28
-37
-42
-50
-connect
-currys
-dixons
-fault
-faults
-faulty
-feature
-features
-firmware
-forum
-hi fi
-how
-info
-information
-instructions
-mount
-pc
-play
-repair
-review
-reviews
-richer sounds
-samsung
-setup
-spec
-specification
-specifications
-stand
-support
-tesco
-tescos
-wall

As I’ve stated earlier in this post. I do not proclaim to be an expert PPCer so Id be delighted to hear of any negative keywords that you all use in your campaigns on a regular basis.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch!

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be sponsored to attend Doug Richard’s School for Startups. It was a full day event held at RGU in Aberdeen, hosted by the ex-dragon himself. The day was aimed at businesses (or prospective businesses) in the web and software sectors.

Being an affiliate marketer and looking to invest some of my profits in both software and web based businesses I felt the day would be very beneficial, I was not disappointed.

The seminar was held in a lecture hall at the Aberdeen Business School. The very same lecture hall I fall asleep in week in week out on my University course! There were over 100 people attending and the morning started off very fast paced with Doug grilling random people about their business ideas.

Doug gave his insights into which questions you should ask yourself when starting out in business. Overall the day was very interesting and insightful. At the end of the seminar I felt compelled to go and speak to Doug. So I headed down to the front of the lecture hall…

Me : “Hi Doug, just wanted to say, thanks very much, today was excellent, learnt a lot and found it very interesting, I hope you can come back to Aberdeen sometime to give some of your other talks”
Doug : “Glad you liked it, I could be back, it all depends on life. Sorry if I am appearing rude, I’ve got to pack my stuff up pretty quickly cause I’ve got a train to catch!”
Me : “Do you need a lift into town?”
Doug : “That would be great, I’ve actually forgotten to book a taxi”

At this point, you can imagine how excited I am at the prospect of being able to pick a multi millionaire’s brain during a 15 minute drive! So, I ran up to my car and tidied it up a bit, its safe to say the outside has never looked muddier! Headed back down to the building and Doug was ready to go.

I asked if he had a Twitter account, turns out he does (@DouglasRichard), so I then asked if I could take a photo to twitpic, he obliged…

So, I nervously reversed out of my space (I felt I had a great deal of responsibility!) and off we go to Aberdeen Train Station.

We had a great chat in the 15-20 mins he was in the car (I drove particularly slow so we had extra chatting time!) and it turned out to be a very productive journey. I wont say anymore than that, but let’s just say I’m very glad I offered Doug a lift!

Moral of the story, ALWAYS say Thank You (if its deserved!) -  because it might just lead to a 15minute car journey with a very successful millionaire!

Big thanks goes to Informatic Ventures for sponsoring me to attend the course.