Voodoo Rooms turned out to be a nice place to grab a few pre-dinner drinks and for everyone to get to know each other (quite a few of us had met before, however there were a few new faces) and Grand Cru provided top notch nachos (only reason I wanted to go! we used to go after work in my Bright Grey days), some questionable service, but generally a nice place to neck some ciders and have a chat!

In attendance were Fraser Edwards, Elaine and Dave Forth, Clarke Duncan, Jonathan Cannovan, Geoff IdleBull (not his actual second name, but its works!), Khalid Al-Khames (sometimes referred to as Ethan), Dom Hodgson, Fiona Robertson, Chris Cathcart, Tommy (Mr. Glasgow.com) and myself! It was a great night (which I named #ScotAff10 on Twitter, which went down well with the group), and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with people with similar interests to my own. I’m keen to get something similar arranged for later on this year. So if you’d be interested in coming to ScotAff10.2 leave a comment and when we get round to organising it you’ll be the first to know! Maybe arrange #XmasScotAff10!

Here are a few pics from the night…

(Elaine, Dave, Fraser and Chris)

(Tommy and Fiona)

(Geoff, Dom and Clarke)

(Johnathan and Khalid)

(A few drinks later at Grand Cru!)

(and finally, Clarke took a photo of me tweeting all the pics!)

Thanks for everyone who made the effort to come along, I think you’ll agree it was a great night and we should definitely do it again sometime soon?

Theres two things worth noting in this image. The top ppc results are now surrounded by a nice pinkish colour. As someone who likes a bit of PPC, I’m loving this as I’m sure it’ll help increase click through rates. Secondly, the top result is indeed a credit card comparison by Google! Good luck taking that number one slot from them.

So, is this the beginning of the end for affiliate marketing, or have we nothing to worry about?

So, you want to know exactly how many searches a term gets every month, week or day? Well, a simple technique I use shows you exactly that. I’m not suggesting this technique is in any way new, or innovative. It’s a simple technique that many newbies may not have heard of, so I figured it is worth sharing.

Whenever I am researching a niche to try and identify whether it will be profitable or not, the first thing I do is punch the keyword (and as many variations as I can think of) into the Google Keyword Tool. If this shows a nice high number of exact matches per month, I then use this trick to identify how many searches there are in reality. All I do is setup an adwords campaign for the exact match keyword, and setup an ad that I know wont get clicked due to irrelevancy. It’s a good idea to have a seperate account to do this, as Google won’t be keen on you if you do this regularly, so you don’t want this method tainting your regular campaigns. To make the ad irrelevant, I tend to just put something about me (it’s ALL about me haha)! For example, I was recently researching a fishing niche (not my usual tipple, but if its profitable, I’m there!) and put up the following ad…

Not all that interesting is it? Well, that’s the point! I had the ad on page one 100% of the time for the chosen keyword for a week, and received 0 clicks. So for a grand total of £0.00 I managed to find out exactly how many searches the term receives over a week. Obviously you’d have to take seasonal issues into account, and whether the product is more popular at certain times of the month, but this gives you a great idea of how popular the term is, with real data that you’ve gathered yourself. Needless to say, the term received a hell of a lot less searches than the Google Keyword Tool suggested, but I’m still going to rock with the niche, cause theres zero competition!

Recently, I found myself (as I quite often do) having an afternoon chat with experienced affiliate, Frank Paul, about our sites and what we’ve got going on at the moment. Next thing I know I’m striking a deal to buy a Lay Betting website. However, I wasn’t offering cash. Those of you who know Frank, know he doesn’t need the money, so a monetary offer was off the table. However, Frank does have a strange facination with Coca Cola. So we sealed the deal. 240 cans of Cola for the domain name LayBetting.org.uk and the site which was on it at the time. The site was receiving a nice amount of traffic from people looking for lay betting strategies and tips, so it was a no brainer for me. The Cola cost me around £55 from Tescos, including delivery direct to Frank’s door. I would need just 2 or 3 signups to the likes of Betfair or BetDaq in order to make my money back. Unfortunately for Frank (but fortunately for his kids, as he only allows them to drink Diet Coke), Tescos thought it would be ok to delivery 9 creates instead of 10, and only 4 crates of full fat coke, rather than 10!

Anyway, since taking control of the site, I’ve added a new wordpress theme, but as you can see I’m yet to add the content. Once the site has content, and a little bit of TLC I am confident I can make the site earn mid to high £xxx per month. However, as is the site’s made a whopping £20 commission, with one sign up to Betdaq, which I’m actually quite happy with considering the lack of content. I won’t retire just yet though!

Anyway, now that I’ve got a little more spare time (or at least 30 mins on this fine Sunday evening), I figured I’d write a blog post, to get this blog back on the road! Here’s a little summary of what I’ve been up to since my last blog post on Christmas Day 2009…

Affiliate Doctors
A couple of months back, Steve from Affiliate Doctors asked if I’d like to join the panel of experts who provide advice to newcomers to affiliate marketing on a regular basis. I was really flattered just to have been asked, so I jumped at the chance. Around six weeks ago, I was officially an Affiliate Doctor, with Steve welcoming me to the team. My first contribution to the site went live on the 18th of March, and there are a few more in the pipeline. It’s an excellent resource for newcomers and experienced affiliates alike, so I’m very happy to be a part of it.

Sold a few sites
Around the beginning of March, I decided I would sell a few of my smaller affiliate sites, mainly to allow me to focus more on my thesis, but also to get some cash together for when I graduate in July. I had never any sold sites before, so was also interested in seeing how the process works. I succesfully sold 10 sites in total, included my first ever affiliate site nrbet.com. I was particularly sad to part ways with nrbet, as it was the first site that I had made, and has always been my “baby” so to speak. However, I just don’t have the time to keep such a site updated, and decided to let it go to a good home, and I’ve very excited to see how it’ll transform over the coming months. The whole process was relatively painless, and I managed to sell any sites with revenue within around 48 hours of listing them on Acorn Domains. I’d also like to thank Khalid, who helped me out by emailing my sale details to his buyers list, resulting in a few sales. The sale of these sites did really help me focus on my thesis, so I’m glad I made the choice to sell up.

A4U
A few months back I was asked to become a moderator on the new A4U forums. I unfortunately haven’t had much time to do much moderating, but now that I’m a little quieter I’ll definitely be frequenting the forums more often, looking for bad guys! Again, I’m flattered to have been asked!

As I’ve still got quite a lot of uni work to go, I won’t be back into the full swing of affiliate marketing until the end of May. At which point, my plan is to work on a few projects I’ve had in the pipeline for a while, and also to get a few joint ventures on the go! In the meantime I’m going to be doing some research, rather than actually creating sites. I’m very interested in getting into domaining, so I’m going to have a look around and see if I can spot any decent opportunities.

You may or may not have noticed, I’ve given this blog a bit of a makeover, I hope you like it!

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

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!

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!

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!

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.