The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

This question came from Evin:

Hi Josh,

First of all, thanks for all the information you share on your website. I have completed the 4 hour work week book 3 times now, and am even more blown away than the first time. Tim did the world a favor by writing that book… and so did you for publishing your website and information for all of us to ingest. For that, thank you!

I know you’re busy, but I wanted to ask your opinion on something. If I don’t ask, then there’s obviously no chance of you responding, right?! :)

Anyway, I’ve been working in the tech industry for over 10 years now, and have been building websites on the side through the whole ride. I recently decided to develop a website that provides self defense and personal safety tips as well as products for sale. I forgot to mention that I’m an avid martial artist of 17 years as well, and have traveled all over teaching, so my website idea was a no-brainer. Anyway, I have created an affiliate program offering 20% to people who place my links and banners on their sites and emails. Do you think that is an adequate amount? Also, there are 100’s of self defense product websites out there, so what would you reccommend for a marketing strategy? I’ve joined the yahoo search marketing program as well as engineseeker.com. I have read countless ebooks on PPC strategies, but so has everyone else. I need a new fresh approach that sets me apart…. that’s why I thought I would ask your opinion on the matter.

Anway, sorry for the length of this email, but my website is http://www.selfdefensesource.com if you would like to take a peek and offer any suggestions for taking it to the top.

I really appreciate you taking the time to read this email… and I definitely appreciate any feedback you may have!

Sincerely,

Evin Hunt
The Self Defense Source
http://www.selfdefensesource.com

Hi Evin,

Thanks for reading my blog :)

Interesting website. It’s great that you opened a website in niche that you are interested in and are enthusiastic about. The design is visually appealing, and you have some content there, which is a good start– especially the two blogs that you started.. keep adding content to those. The navigation is fine as well.. so all is dandy, but there are some things that I recommend you improve. You asked for my advice, so I’m going to give it to you :)

1) Write unique content for each product. If you don’t do this, you will be faced with ‘duplicate content’ penalties and run the risk of not having your most important product pages not listed in the search engines. For example, this sentence came from your site: ” Pepper spray is a non-lethal chemical agent which is used in riot control, crowd control and personal”. If you type that with quotes into Google, you will see many other sites using that same sentence. So the first thing is to re-write all your content so that it’s unique.

2) Submit to shopping search engines, such as shopping.com,froogle.com (not sure if they still accept content), etc.

3) Try to obtain/barter/buy as many high quality links as possible, especially Yahoo directory, DMOZ, etc. to help with search engine rankings.

4) I don’t think you are going to do well with your 20% affiliate program. Even if you raise your commission, it’s still going to be difficult to attract affiliates because affiliates are interested in high payouts. If you give affiliates even 50% commission, they may still be dealing with order sizes of $10-$20, which is not really that great in the affiliate world. So, I think you should continue to try to promote your affiliate program, but if you dont get any signups, you may consider investing your time elsewhere..

5) Try to add more products/categories of products to your inventory to give the user great choice/selection

6) Change your title tags so that your description comes first, then if necessary the name of your website in the title tag. This will give more weight to your important keywords

So those are just a few observations..

Regarding a marketing strategy, I think you can try to ‘trademark bid’. If you signed up for my newsletter on my site (just go to scrappybusiness.com and enter your email address on the right form), then you would have been sent a video that shows you how to ‘trademark bid’ on Google. What this means is you are bidding on the domain names of your competitors as keywords. So for example, if your competitor is ‘ allaboutmase.com’, then you bid on that keyword and your ad shows up if someone types it in. Since there’s not many advertisers under this keyword, your bid price is less..s

Hope these tips are helpful :)

Seeya,
Joshua

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Q and A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.