“Hi.

I would like some opinions on how to increase the conversion rate at Caricature King.

Traffic is healthy, and while many may be just stopping by to look at the images, I feel there is more conversion upside that can be achieved. I have tried various approaches, but with a product that is not just click and buy, KISS is essential. I think it is, but is it?

Many thanks.

Matt.”

Click To Enlarge

Here’s what Dan and Kier had to say …

Dan

Hi Matt, how are you? I think you are right when you say that simple is better for this site.

Using & ordering through the site is a very complicated experience at the moment.

The site has quite a complicated ordering process. That’s likely to be the hardest thing to change, so I won’t cover that here. Instead I will just give you a few ideas of things I might change, and show you one example of how you could simplify the ‘artist sample’ page.

WHERE TO START IN FIXING THE SITE YOURSELF

A lot of people will tell you to dive into google analytics & find the drop off points, run some A/B testing, and things like that. I think though, before you do any of that, just go through the site a few times pretending you are a potential customer. There are lots of confusing elements on the site and, I think if you pretend you’ve never seen the site before, you’ll easily spot them & be able to clean them up.

If you go through each page, look at each element, asking “by having this here, am I making this page more or less confusing? would a new visitor be more or less likely to buy when they see this?”

Here are a few examples of things to fix:

FIX THE HEADER & TAGLINE

At the top of every page on the site, it says “A caricature artist’s market place. Promoting artists since 2005.” That doesn’t really tell a visitor what you do. I suspect if you asked 10 people on the street “what is a caricature artist’s market place?”, you’d get 10 very confused looks. Instead you might want to choose something simple like “Order wonderful personalised gifts from the world’s greatest caricature artists”.

FIX THE “SIGN UP” BOX

There’s a “sign up for our email to win a free caricature” box right in the middle of the homepage.

There are 2 things I would fix there:

1. It doesn’t actually work – it gives a server error if you use it. Obviously error messages make sites feel untrustworthy.

2. You’re giving people the chance to win your only product. Perhaps you could give them a ‘how to draw caricatures’ guide instead?

FIX THE HOMEPAGE

At the moment you just show caricatures on the homepage. I’d be tempted to show the ‘before’ photos too. That’s just a gut feeling.

I’d remove the ‘buy in US $ | buy in AUST $ | Buy in EURO’ from the homepage. I doubt that you’d lose any sales by asking the visitors to view more samples of each artist, with “View more samples from Ben” rather than just “More samples” for example.

FIX THE ARTISTS PAGES

Taking Shane’s page as an example. I think you could hugely simplify these pages. The page begins with ‘CLICK HERE to see estimated delivery times for Shane’. So I click that and it takes me to another page that just lists all the artists & their delivery times. I think “hang on, who was the artist I was looking at again?” & I try to click back but you’ve popped up a new window so the back button doesn’t work. I finally go close the window, go back & then I have to remember that it’s 10 working days. All of that could be avoided if you just published the estimated delivery times on the artist pages.

Further down this page, you tell the visitor that there are discounts of 8%, 11%, 15%, etc. But there are no prices on that page so this is meaningless information at this stage.

Rather than carry on like this, I thought I’d illustrate one way of simplifying it with a mockup.

Click the thumbnails below for a ‘before’ & ‘after’ example:

BEFORE

AFTER

These complications & confusing elements continue through the price & order process. I would go through the rest of the pages on the site, following the same process of removing/fixing anything that’s confusing & simplifying everything where possible. Do it page by page to make sure results are improving rather than decreasing & you should be onto a winner.

Let me know if this was any use & if I can help in any other way.

Dan

P.S. 2 bonus thoughts:

Bonus thought 1: It gets recommended by everyone but, just in case you haven’t read it, “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug is a great book on fixing problems like this through user testing.

Bonus thought 2: If you do want to see what some actual users think, usertesting.com & whatusersdo.com have some very cheap user video services.

Kier

Hi Matt

I’ll admit to not knowing a huge amount about caricatures but the first thing that struck me when I looked at the homepage was that the caricatures you show on the front page could be good or bad but I don’t know, because they aren’t of people I know! Until I click through and see the photos of the people involved it makes it a difficult process to choose more. As such I’d advise you get your artists to knock up some caricatures of instantly recognisable celebs for the homepage so people can judge the quality of their work more easily.

Overall the site feels far too cluttered. There’s lots of interesting stuff in there to make people want to buy, but it’s disorganised and the purchase side of things feels like an afterthought. I would consider substantially simplifying the options in the navigation panel on the left so there is more focus on what you want people to do, which is BUY. You can keep the same content in there, but make it more organised and further from the homepage where the user will land by having nested options within the navigaion, and of course, on each page make sure that the user can go straight to the purchase process at any time. The purchases process itself is far too complicated and text heavy, get this as clean, intuitive and simple as you can. If someone is ready to buy then you want to put as little resistance as possible between them having that intention and following through on it. Also kill that floating competition box, it’s really frustrating!

First things first, Matt is one of the most friendly and helpful people I’ve come across.  Customer service is A1, and at every stage of the process, he pulls out all the stops to make sure you get what you want.  I had a quick chat with Matt about commissioning 11 doc caricatures (with a 20% discount – nice notch!), and then fired over the pics to Matt so that artist, Brian, could get to work straight away.

So how does it all work?

Well you can order a number of different formats from head and shoulder shots to full body artwork.  Simply visit the site, select your preferred artist and pay online.  You then send Matt a photo and he gets the artist to knock up a rough pencil sketch to give an idea of what the full colour version will look like, and then gives you an opportunity to request any changes.  The pencil sketch can look a bit thin, but don’t worry, this is just to give you an idea.  Once you’re happy, the artist completes the full colour caricature in a matter of days (we had 11 remember).  When you have the final caricature, Matt checks again that everything is as you expect.  If not, he can ‘make it so’.

Here’s an example of the process for Kieron’s caricature (click images to enlarge):

The price?

At the time of writing, a head and shoulders caricature will set you back just €28.00/$39.99 USD/$48.50 AUD (about £25) with up to 25% on bulk orders.  Matt also runs his own in house caricature king affiliate scheme paying 10% commission on an average sale price of $115 AUD.

Since Affiliate Doctors started, a number of other affiliate’s have also used Matt’s services, and you can see another example over at Ray Theakston’s blog Befuddled.  Feeling old?  Well Matt’s team are so good in fact, that some of the people at the last Expo commented on how the artist did a brilliant job of rejuvenating some of the docs

Fancy a Free Caricature?

As a thanks to all AffiliateDocs readers, if you would like to win a ‘head and shoulders’ caricature of your own, all you need to do is become a fan of Affiliate Doctors on Facebook or leave a comment on here telling us why and what you’d use your caricature for.  One winner will be drawn at random at the end of the month!

* affiliate link – any money will go to the The PACE Centre Charity for Children with Motor Disabilities and Kiva Team Affiliate.

Frances – Product Selection

“I am new to affiliate marketing and want to design a parent/kids site around affiliate sales. How do I figure out which kinds of products have the higher commission rates – e.g. musical instruments pay more than electronics?

Is there anything else I should consider when designing my site.”

Dan

Hi, Frances, how are you?

Here’s one way to figure out how much you could make from a particular product:

1. Pick a product you may want to sell
2. Figure out a rough average price for the product
3. Find a few merchants selling it (who have affiliate programs)
4. Check their commission rates

[Multiply the average price by the commission rate, and you have the amount that you'll make per sale of the product.]

5. If they give you the information, have a look at their average ‘conversion rate’ (the percentage of people who see the product on their site who then go on to purchase it).

[Multiply that percentage by your 'amount per sale' number, and you have a very rough idea of how much you'll make for every visitor you send to their site.]

6. Figure out how much traffic you think you can get to your site each month, and a percentage of that traffic that you think you’ll be able to send on to the merchant.

[Multiply those 2 together to give you a rough figure for how many visitors you'll send to merchants each month. THEN multiply that the 'amount you'll make per visitor', and you have a rough figure for how much money you could make per month if you advertised that product.]

A lot of this will be finger in the air stuff, but the more you do it the more you’ll get a feeling for it.

Hope that helps & sorry for the extreme use of the word ‘multiply’!

Dan

Carl – Datafeedr

“Have any of you guys had experience in using datafeedr?

If you have stayed away, why was that?

What do you recommend out of Datafeedr, popshops or ECU?

Thanks

Carl”

Lammo

Hey Carl.

First of all, let me say that I have a vested interest in this as ECU is our baby – That being said I believe all three are truly outstanding products that actually serve quite different purposes, and I’d have no hesitation in recommending any of them.

You haven’t said in your question what it is you want to achieve – Are you looking to quickly knock up sites from datafeeds? Monetise existing content with relevant products? All three products will to one extent or another enable you to populate an affiliate site with products courtesy of merchant’s product feeds. The main differing factor between them is exactly what you’re expecting them to do for YOU, and the level of technical knowledge you may have.

Obviously if you’d like to know more about Easy Content Units and what it can do for you, I’d be more than happy to walk you through the system and demo just how simple it is to use. Just give me a shout on john@easycontentunits.com.

“Hi.

I bumped into the very friendly Elaine Forth during my recent day out at ThinkVisibilty in Leeds. During a quick chat I explained my teething troubles with my first affiliate site and she recommended I get in touch, so here goes…

www.simplychildsavings.co.uk is my entry into the affiliate marketing arena. It’s 5 months old and full of original unique content for parents looking to save cash for their little ones.

I’m a Dad myself and experienced in financial services so I’ve designed a site that I think is genuinely unique.

The problem is Google doesn’t agree.

Yahoo seems to like me a lot. I’m on the first page for keywords such as ‘children’s savings’ and ‘compare child trust funds’, but my only success with Google seems to be scattered longtail keyphrases.

So, can you help? Have I been penalised for some basic blunder (I submitted my site for reconsideration which has been apparently done) . The site is built using Wordpress – is there something I’m doing fundamentally wrong?

I recognise I’ve only got a handful of backlinks but Yahoo doesn’t seem to mind. Is Google so dependent on links that it doesn’t care about content?

Thanks

Simon Westwell”

Kier

Hi Simon.

Google cares a lot about links. I’m unsure from your question exactly what the problem you have is, your site seems to show up in Google. If you mean you aren’t ranking well then yes build more links! That’s the reality of things. Thankfully as you have lots of good content, if you make the time to build the links then you should do well. I would advise making your title tags a bit more focused though, choose on keyword/phrase for each and then put variations of it in the <h> tags. This will give more power to those that you choose. Unfortunately, finance is a very competitive area though so you may find this a tough niche. I’d advise to keep working on this steadily over time, don’t get too despondent if things don’t kick off straight away. Get some other sites on the boil but keep at it. If you know your stuff and the content is good, then with time and links you should be able to make a decent bit off the site.

Lammo

It’s a refreshing change to see someone starting a site that they actually have an interest in.. so many people chase the money and start a site about credit cards or poker tips, and then end up abandoning it after 3 weeks because they’re sick to death of writing about the subject matter. Myself and my fellow Doctors are always saying “do a site you’re passionate about”, so it’s good to see someone doing that already.

I certainly don’t profess to be an SEO expert (a quick glance at the search results for most of my sites will confirm this!), but I doubt very much that you’ve done anything wrong as such to annoy Google – they certainly have around 65 pages indexed for your site, so you’re not blacklisted!

I feel your pain though.. I launched a site two years ago now.. and religously added content every single day for nearly 6 months.. at which point Google was sending me the grand sum of 20 visitors a day.. I was convinced that I’d done something wrong, and even had some SEO guys check out the source code for me.. all was fine. So I kept on adding content and (most importantly IMO) building links. After around 8/9 months, almost as though someone at Google had flicked a switch, I started to see rankings and traffic. After two years, I’m still adding content and building links on a regular basis and have some very tasty positions in the search results, all of which I would put down to not giving up when it seemed Google was ignoring my site!

Are you motivated enough to keep adding content to this site for another 6-9 months before Google pays you any attention? Since you submitted your site for review, the new Coalition Government has been elected and announced that Child Trust Funds are to be abolished. Yet despite that news happening over a month ago, I could see no mention of that on your site? you don’t have “Trust fund” in the domain name, so this news hasn’t killed your site, far from it.. Now that CTF’s are to be no more, many parents will want to know what the alternatives are. You have this page which I would update with a very detailed article looking at the range of options open now that CTF is no more. Then I’d PPC that page for terms like “child trust fund alternatives”, “child trust fund changes”, “child trust fund 2011” etc, to build up not only potential visitors and revenue, but also natural links to your site. Become a source of information in a market that has a lot of uninformed people, and you should succeed. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

“Hi Doctors.

I am looking for your experienced feedback on the domain name ‘VacuumSupermarket.com’.

6 million vacuum cleaners are sold each year or 16,500 each day.  I am confident that a strong website can affiliate sell 250 vacuum cleaners each day, generating £410,000 annually.

I have launched one site, www.vacuumsales.co.uk, but I am interested in your views on using the domain VacuumSupermarket.com.

Many thanks.

Gareth.”

Dan

Hi, Gareth.

I’m not sure whether you’re asking “which of these 2 domain names should I use?” or “should I launch a second site on this other domain?” or “I’m trying to use one of these for the UK, one for the USA, will this work?” – so here are my quick thoughts on all 3:

1. VacuumSales or VacuumSupermarket?

Stick with the one you’re using. The only difference between the 2 in terms of potential is the .co.uk vs .com . You already have some content there & the domain name isn’t holding you back, so stick with it.

2. Should you launch a second site on it?

If you’re just targeting the UK & you’re thinking of launching the second site to try and get more sales, I think you should forget aout it for the time being. When your first site hits the top few spots on google for your primary terms, then take a look at launching the second.

3. Should you launch the .com as a USA site and the .co.uk as a UK site?

Yes: If you have the time & the energy to do both, why not sell in both markets? (I assume they call them vacuums over there? and supermarkets?)

4. Bonus thoughts

Bonus thought A: If you’re already making money through vacuumsales, and you’re serious about wanting to make this really big, why not try and get one of the generics? There are at least 8 decent generics  (vacuums/vacuum/vacuumcleaner/vacuumcleaners.co.uk or .com) – even more if you hyphenate!

Bonus thought B: I’d love it if you did make £0.41m through this site per year, but it would be tough. If my maths is right & your numbers are right, that’s just under 2% of the entire market. I suspect offline sales are fairly high with vacuums, and that many people go to a brand they trust online direct when buying a vacuum (i.e. just go straight to John Lewis/Argos without ever hitting search).

Bonus thought C: You may want to put together a ‘Vacuum Buyers Guide’ and give it away in exchange for the visitors email address. Send them an automated ‘top 10 vacuum cleaners’ email (with aff links) in return. It immediately gives you extra chances to sell to them with no real ongoing effort.

Hope that’s useful & good luck with the site.

Dan.

Roll on 9 years and Chris now operates a number of businesses spanning gadgets, lingerie, seasonal gifts, the great outdoors and mobile phones, with his company generating around £3m in sales for a number of household brands.

What makes Chris unique is that he has managed to build up his affiliate businesses whilst holding down a very demanding job with Hewlett-Packard – a job that he still enjoys and successfully combines with his passion for affiliate marketing to this very day.

A stickler for detail, Chris was one of the harder Docs to please when it came to getting his caricature right.  This first attempt was promptly rejected when Chris confirmed that he now sports the smooth look:

A keen photographer, scuba diver and supporter of Tranmere Rovers, Chris also enjoys doing his bit for “charidee”. Often found competing in numerous 10k events around the country, Chris has managed to raise over £5,500 for UK charities and talks others into joining his Kiva team, lending $9,500 to businesses in third world countries (new members welcome http://www.kiva.org/team/affiliates).

An active member on the A4U forum, Chris is known to speak his mind, but enjoys helping other affiliates and sharing his knowledge. Not wishing to list any particular area of expertise, Chris has a wealth of experience across the board including PPC, SEO, advising new merchants, General AM stuff, yet is always open to, and often seeks, others suggestions and critique.

We look forward to hearing some insights from Chris over the coming months.

Welcome on board Frostie.

Frostie’s Bio

P.S. Cheers for the artwork Matt

As director of Coldsnail Ltd, he manages over twenty websites that cover a huge variety of subjects including Lingerie, Gadgets, Mobile Phones and Days Out and has seasonal/vertical websites focusing on  Book Price Comparisons, Christmas, Valentines, Mother’s Day etc..

Chris is an old timer, having been involved in affiliate marketing since 2000.  He’s seen it change considerably and has found himself having to adapt as time’s gone by.  Having once been Google and MS Adcenter qualified, he now finds himself focusing on, and being passionate about, content driven websites.

One such website is Gadget Awards.  The domain (bought 4 years ago) has laid dormant until earlier this year. There are now almost daily reviews of the latest gadgets and gizmos, focusing on those that have appeared on Channel 5’s The Gadget Show.  The content is unique, regular and provides (via Easy Content Units) a list of online stockists providing the cheapest prices.

If the outdoors are more to your liking, then another of Chris’ sites The Outdoors, should prove useful.  Reviews of National Trust properties (yes he’s reached that age where he thinks a National Trust Memebership is cool), current weather conditions and location maps, help draw readers in and provide them with a “unique user experience” that we continue to hear Google churn out.

Although Chris spends a lot of time and effort managing his websites, he also has a full time job as Global Service Lead for Hewlett Packard. This variance from website management offers him the diversity he has come to appreciate and expect from his numerous projects. He doesn’t consider it a 9-5 daily grind and the day he does, he plans to either quit this job and pursue affiliate marketing full time, or take a complete change in direction and move away from IT altogether.

When Chris isn’t working, he can usually be found travelling to some foreign country, SCUBA diving, whacking golf balls or quietly, almost ashamedly, supporting Tranmere Rovers.  To chillax, he’ll bang out a tune on the Piano having learned from the age of 6, or can be found taking up his new passion Photography.

One piece of advice that Chris continues to give to all new affiliates is to create a website based on something you enjoy personally.  By doing so, you’ll find yourself focusing more on content rather than £’s that can be generated. It will be less of a chore to keep updated and you will most probably learn and it should be less of a chore.

Frostie’s Intro Post

“Hi Docs.
 
When creating a PPC campaign for a retail website, what is the best way to organise the various permutations and combinations of keywords?
 
Take the following ‘widget’ example – all of the following ‘widget’ related keywords should be bid on, as tightly within the account structure as possible:
 
‘widget’
‘buy widget’
‘cheap widget’
‘blue widget’
 
That would be logical I’m guessing – an ad group for each.
 
But how do you account for the combinations e.g. ‘buy cheap blue widget(s)’?
 
Then, as is often the case, how do you factor in synonyms of ‘widget’ which people will also be searching for?
 
I know the importance of negative keywords to tighten each ad group in this situation, but without having an optimal account structure in the first place it kind of feels like wasted effort.
 
I know this is a problem because the keywords that get the most impressions and clicks in my campaigns tend to be broad and phrase matches rather than exact.  That said, I do get a good CTR on the broad and phrase, and nearly always have a QS of 10 (a few 7’s but really not many, and none below 7).
 
This feels like the missing piece in my PPC puzzle so any help much appreciated!
 
Thanks.
 
Julie.”

Here’s what Shane had to say …

Shane

Hi Julie.

This is a good question and one which crops up even in well set up and well managed accounts, basically just how granular do you go, at what stage and what’s the best way to do it?

Split into Themed Adgroups

We would definitely split the account down into themed adgroups, so in your example, yes, we would make those separate adgroups for sure: 

‘widget’
‘buy widget’
‘cheap widget’
‘blue widget’
etc …

For combinations of multiple theme phrases like “Buy cheap blue widget” then there are three options:

1) Create a ‘fishing’ test adgroup and load all the terms (but link them to the most relevant landing page for each term via the individual keyword url option). See which of these terms gets enough volume to create other smaller adgroups from them, and then either move those keywords to the most relevant existing adgroups on a keyword by keyword basis, or to newer adgroups if enough of a common theme with volume came up.

Or

2) Add the terms straight to the most relevant adgroup (isn’t always clear cut, as some could go in two or more different adgroups i.e “cheap” or “blue”)

Or

3) Create lots of small and very targeted adgroups knowing most of the work will be a waste of time.

The problem in large scale PPC is to know how granular to go from the outset; you want to cover the main terms, but avoid wasted time and maximise the number of sales in a short timescale whilst you are working on the campaigns. If you think about it, you’ll see the data is there for you to figure out in most cases.

Taking “blue widget” as an example, let’s say this has 1000 searches per month, what’s the odds that “buy blue widget” is more than this!? … very little! In fact, with every variable added, you’ll find the search volume usually drops significantly, so you know this will be a lower volume term. Taking it one step further, “buy cheap blue widget” will be even less often searched, so you can quickly figure out the order of priority when breaking the keywords down by looking to the search volume of the next most popular phrase up.

“Buy cheap blue widget” – A Case in Point

So Julie in your “buy cheap blue widget” example: depending on how big the volume is in the first place for “widget” and “buy widget” etc., you could end up with the following combined variables:

action, price, colour, item etc.

… then you could figure out all the “action” words such as:

buy, find, compare etc.

… then the “price” ones such as:

cheap, cheapest, discount etc.

… then the “colours”:

blue, red, yellow etc.

… and finally the item and variations, synonyms like:

“thingybobs”, “thingymajigs” etc.

Now imagine the scenario in doing this by creating an “optimal account structure” from the outset. When combined into two, three and four keyword combinations, that’s around 350 adgroups just to cover these four variable themes.  In most cases, many won’t result in any impressions let alone clicks or sales (we used to do it this way years ago when 2000 keywords per adgroup was a target, not a redundant feature as is the case now).

The solution is in which way to tackle the workload, we hate messy structures too, but optimal account structure is what you strive FOR at a point in time; usually always ahead as the landscape is constantly changing, but at the outset you can have “an” optimal account structure for now that will do to get going, and then quickly refine and expand as you go.

The main point I’m trying to get across is that you can’t always start out with it as optimum unless you are willing to waste many hours (in some cases hundreds of hours).  Once you step away from the main terms and add variables to keywords to other variables, most of what you do from guess work won’t actually get many impressions in most cases. So you can either sit down and create huge campaigns with every possible variation of multiple keywords, tens of campaigns, hundreds of adgroups and tens of thousands of keywords, OR you can do the volume terms first, then get those live and break it down based on volume into smaller adgroups. Once you’ve done that, you can keep re-refining those adgroups to smaller ones as new keywords bed in etc..

In your “buy cheap blue widget” example, I’d be tempted to do just a couple of shorter keyword adgroups first to see what traffic is out there:

“cheap coloured widget”
“buy coloured widget”

Basically, we would see which of the new terms gets a viable volume of searches, and then create groups out of those starting with the most searched and clicked terms. So if “price blah blah widget” gets more traffic over “coloured blah blah widget”, create your adgroup to be predominantly price based and put the lower volume coloured yet priced keywords in there too (but link to the coloured landing page by each keyword url). Do this until such time as there are enough keywords and/or traffic in them to earn the right for an adgroup of their own.

Broad, Phrase and Exact Match

When you say you get most clicks on broad and phrase, move your mindset to think like this:

Every broad match click you get from now on is a phrase match you missed that you could be getting a better CTR for in a tighter adgroup with relevant adcopy going to a targeted landing page (*some will be clicks you’d wish you had on negative matches too!) and paying less for overall.

Every phrase match click you get from now on is a click you missed adding as an exact match that could be getting a better CTR in a tighter adgroup with targeted adcopy going to a targeted landing page (*some will be clicks you’d wish you had on negative matches too!) and paying less for overall.

The higher the CTR, the lower the cost per click as google earns more, so even though you may have a QS of 10, you can still lower that click cost with more highly targeted matching. This will benefit the overall health of the campaign, as CTR of the url itself is taken into account with QS in conjunction with the health of adgroups, campaigns and the account as a whole.

Synonyms

As for synonyms, use the search query reports to see exactly which terms are driving traffic. Search google for synonyms etc. and then do adgroups for these based in order of the search and/or click volume on the main “widget” variations you already have. You’ll find you have to stop after a few adgroups as the volume is too low. There’s no real point doing every adgroup exactly copied from “widgets” campaigns if the main synonym for it is “thingamabob”. If it only gets 10% of the volume as a keyword as widgets does to begin with, you’ll just bloat your account up with useless adgroups which is pointless work.

On the plus side Google is beta testing a new matching option called modified broad match. I blogged about this recently at http://www.revenueaddict.com/broad-match-gets-cleverererer-good-news-finally.html. This should help in the targeting as you could go ‘+cheap widget’ or ‘+cheap blue widget’ and catch all variations on a broad but more targeted match, as the term after the “+” must be in the search term, but the rest is still broad match. However, it’s no excuse for not running frequent search query reports to identify the keywords you need to phrase and exact or negative match.

Hope that helps!

Tim wrote in to ask for some pointers on his new gadget review site – gadgetopinions.co.uk.

“Hi Guys.

I would like to submit my new website for surgery consideration.

Any advice would be appreciated since I am still deciding which direction to go in with the site. I’m trying to decide whether or not I should cover mainstream gadgets, or whether I should put my focus onto hi-tech, “long-tail” gadgets.

Thanks, Tim.”

Here’s what Jay and Clarke had to say …

Jay

Strategy

My recommendation to you would be to continue providing the reviews you are doing, but also to develop slightly more niche reviews to build up your website. This would have the benefit of developing a USP, ensuring that people come to your site for those specialist reviews. You should strive to ensure that reviews are as timely as possible too, reacting to new product launches or events to ensure that you are seen as up-to-date – something that is very important in the gadget world.

You should really try to keep updating the site as frequently as you can. This will ensure that you always have fresh content. I’d recommend outsourcing if you cannot do this yourself. The more relevant, fresh content, the better for both user experience and for search engines.

Content

I noticed that you also have a section named ‘gadget guides’ which could be a great way to get content on the site that would draw in visitors and act as link bait. If these were comprehensive and kept up to date (think about automating or outsourcing the content if needs be), then they could really support your site’s content. However, it’s important to note that visitors searching for ‘guides’ probably already own mobile phones, and so they probably won’t be looking to purchase anything. Unless of course the guides showed that accessories were the way forward, but these are low value. Lots of pros and cons to this strategy! But the guides could always include Adsense or display ads.

You should also ensure that all pages are highly targeted though contextual ads / other content to make sure that users have the best possible experience. So when someone visits for a particular review, the ads on that page should be as relevant as possible. The large display ad you have in the top of the side bar is often distracting through animation and not very well related. Another idea is to make use of features such as links to related posts (Wordpress has the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that works wonders), show tweets that talk about that content or any other related content, whether it is on your site or from another social site.

SEO

Taking a step back and looking at the site from a different – SEO – angle, I would highly recommend that you identify your core keywords, then your ‘secondary’ keywords and so on. These will be different according to each page, but will help guide the structure of the site and the content. For example, one of the core keywords for your home page is ‘gadget reviews’. Other core keywords for rest the site would be categories such as ‘laptop reviews’ or ‘mobile phone reviews’ or ‘mobile phone user guides’ and so on. All of these core keywords should really form the main navigation on the site, dictating the core directories and ‘hubs’ for the reviews etc.

For the review pages, the keywords they should be targeting would include the make and model of the gadget followed by ‘review’, such as ‘Dell Inspiron 1525 review”, but you may want to do some research using the Google Keyword Tool for example, to see which keywords have the most traffic but least competition, and compare these numbers to your existing highest converting keywords on the site.

SEO ‘quick wins’

Browsing the site, there are a few ‘quick wins’ you could fix before even getting to the site structure and content stage which include ensuring that you promote the most important headings on pages, and demote those that are less important. For example, some review pages have an empty <H2> heading tag. Why not structure your review so that the main heading includes the core keywords (probably the make and model plus the word ‘review’), and then have subheadings with some keyword variation to break up the text which would make the reviews easy and attractive to read.

The page <titles> should also include the core keyword for each page first, followed by keyword variations or a succinct description.

Location-based targeting

I noticed that in some instances you are using adding ‘UK’ to some page <titles> for example. I’m not convinced that the content you are offering is location dependent. The content is actually fairly universal. If you wish to narrow down your targeting to just a UK audience, for example for your affiliate programs, then in addition to your .co.uk domain name, you should consider getting UK-based web hosting and adding location centric content such as shop locations and shop reviews or price/service comparisons to strengthen this targeting. Comparing shops (such as John Lewis, Currys, Amazon UK) would narrow down your target audience naturally, as not all these shops are available internationally.

Clarke

Hi Tim.

Firstly, get rid of the Google Advert Banner across the middle top of your site, I feel it’s a huge turn off if it’s the first and main thing you see, however feel free to add it down the bottom of the site. You already have a Google Ads on the top right square box and you really don’t need much more than that as the initial thing users see.

The reviews are not very inspiring, one paragraph of text and no images, flesh it out with an image of what you’re talking about.

Get some kind of directory structure in your main url paths (I see you have a directory but it’s separate from the actual product urls) and start to build up different sections to your site. As it stands you have all the products in their own directory, whereas if I was on site looking at mobile or laptop reviews, I would expect to click down and read other reviews.

You can’t click on any of the reviews to go to a site selling them or a manufacture site, I take it your plan is to add Affiliate links later, if not and it’s just about showing Google Adverts, then I can’t see this ever working at any great scale, but if that’s the case then bear minimum to expect is to see a row of Google AdSense adverts after the review.

By the way, you also need to update your Wordpress version and the plugins you’re using.  By not keeping up-to-date with the latest Wordpress versions and plugins, you put your site at risk and you also miss out on improvements to the code.

Editor’s Note

Hi Tim.

Thanks for sending in your site for review and hope that Jay and Clarke have given you some ideas on what to do. The gadget sector is definitely a tough one to tackle with the amount of competition and high quality sites that are out there. Having said that, Kirsty’s post on niche selection yesterday was an interesting read, so check that out as well. One of the points relevant to your case was not letting pre-conceptions prevent you from entering a niche that you think is over saturated: “Choose a small area and don’t take on the big boys, but don’t be put off by a little competition either” … best of luck.

“Dear Affiliate Doctors.

Up until a week ago I worked for a large video game company as one of their senior programmers until they decided that they were going to make half of their staff “at risk” of redundancy.  This means that after a 30-day consultation period I will find out if I am actually redundant but it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that I will lose my job at the start of March [editor’s note: Marc has since lost his job].  For the past 15 years I’ve worked in the video games industry and this will be the third time I’ve lost my job in the past 10 years, whilst also avoiding losing it twice in that time.  It’s not an industry to be in if you want job security!  I have a wife and two young children, and I’m a bit fed up of the constant threat of job loss and the industry’s expectation that its staff will work ridiculous hours.

As I will be getting four months of pay in addition to a redundancy package, I’m thinking that it might be time to leave this badly managed industry behind and take the plunge into starting my own affiliate-based business.  I’ve been dabbling with affiliate marketing for the past year or two and had some mixed results with the minimal time I’ve put into it.  This experience has been the creation of a few niche mini-sites, PPC to some of those sites and direct-to-Amazon PPC (when it was allowed).

So on to my question …  With the money I will be paid, I should have at least enough to keep my mortgage and bills paid for 6 to 12 months.  However, I’m mindful that I might have to get a job at some point within that time period to make sure we keep the roof over our heads if any circumstances should change.  I’d like to focus 100% of my energy on creating a sustainable business, but my problem is that I’m not sure where to focus that energy so that I make the most of my free time.

If the Affiliate Doctors were in my position, what would they suggest I do in order to start creating a long-term affiliate business?  I appreciate that six months might be a bit quick to start to become a so-called “Super Affiliate”, but any pointers in the right direction for not needing a normal job will be much appreciated.

As I’m a programmer by day, I have all of the necessary skills for web development, and this is something I enjoy and think I’m good at.  I have created a web application engine for price comparison from data feeds and this will probably take around another month to be totally finished.  Is it worth focusing on this or is the price comparison market far too competitive for a newbie?

I know that “if you had to start from scratch, how would you do it?” isn’t an easy question to answer, but I’m going to kick myself in a year from now if I don’t at least attempt to get a business started now that I have the chance.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Marc.”

Here’s what Mark Boyd and Elaine had to say …

Mark B

Hi Marc, sorry to hear about the redundancy, but one good thing to come of it is that you can push yourself to make a success of your affiliate business. Many don’t have that drive, and therefore fail, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing you losing your job.

OK, in a nutshell you’ve asked what I would do if I were in your shoes. Well, let’s just identify what sort of shoes you’re standing in before we move on…

- You’ve got some money to outlay to jumpstart an affiliate business
- You’ve got experience in affiliate marketing in general, website building and PPC
- You’ve got programming experience (having worked as a senior programmer)

So, basically, you’re wearing £500 black Italian leather shoes! You’ve got all the things that I didn’t have when I started out. The things that I do have now (not quite to the same extent as you, my programming sucks) five years down the line. So instead of telling you what I’d do if I were in your shoes, I’ll tell you what I’m doing, in um… my own shoes!

When I started in affiliate marketing, I started with just one site, dedicated to matched betting (recently sold this site to allow me to focus on my damn thesis, and I am still a little touchy about the whole thing, so let’s not mention this again!) and that was all that I focussed on. As time progressed I moved into the mini sites market and created hundreds of mini sites, with greatly differing results. I’m now at the stage where I’m going to move back to the larger sites (I’ll still make mini sites, I can’t help myself), and I’m doing so with my PPC shoes on. I’m lucky enough to have access to enough money to invest in making excellent sites and also to pump into a PPC budget for each site. So my focus recently has been on finding relatively generic sites that I can create, and then focus on PPC’ing specific sections of the sites that I know will convert well based on my mini sites experience.

For example (completely hypothetical), if I’d had a bunch of mini sites selling golf equipment that did particularly well, I’d be looking to create a generic site about all things golf, and then PPC the sections that are likely to convert effectively.

So, if I were you, I’d do the following:

- Create a list of generic sites you’d be interested in working on
- In the meantime, swot up on all things PPC, even if it’s just reading a couple of articles a day
- Identify the merchants related to each potential site, then analyse their conversion rates, commission rates, websites, etc etc to get a feel for how “worthy” they’d be of your promotion time
- Whittle the list down to just one site
- Hire a decent Wordpress designer to make you a super sexy site that is geared up to convert from head to toe
- Invest your time/money in decent content, not only will this help your conversions, it will help your organic rankings
- Get cracking with your PPC campaigns, find out what works, and stick with it

Many people are scared by the horror stories of PPC. If you stick to a daily budget you can afford and utilise the matching options correctly, you’re not going to be in for any surprises. Start with just using exact match keywords (to do this, just put square brackets around the keyword when adding it to the campaign, so add [super duper high converting keyword]) and then when you’re more confident move onto broad matching, but only if you have a ridiculously long negative keyword list.
I wish you the best of luck, if you need any PPC help, feel free to give me a nudge!

Elaine

Hello Marc, just go for it.

I think you’ll find that once you have the time to concentrate fully on Affiliate Marketing you will become more focussed, and it’s much easier to complete projects when you have days instead of a few stolen hours.

Allkids really took off when I decided to leave my part-time job at the Halifax!!
If I had to start again, and I could replace my brain with a more technical one, I’d combine a niche I’m interested in with a price comparison model – don’t give your visitors the chance to leave and go looking elsewhere.  And don’t forget to include some pure information pages, if it’s relevant – they’re great for pulling in visitors and getting your site known.

I’d also look at using data feeds, but, if it’s a small site, you’ll need to be able to create your own descriptions, to differentiate your site from the crowd – Google likes ‘different’ and SEO is important – combined with good original content.

My latest project is looking at the conversion rates on our sites and how we can improve them, so that’s something I wish I’d spent a bit more time on before embarking on any changes!

I’d also take the time to attend industry gatherings and get to know other folk – it’s not just about making deals and coming away with profitable ideas and networking with the topcats – I find it does concentrate the mind and does give your morale a boost when you’ve spent some time with like minded people.

You won’t need a fancy pants, all singing and dancing site – just something that’s easy to use and easy to look at, and something you can update easily to take advantage of any special offers etc.

P.S. don’t spend too much time reading and learning either – it’s all very fascinating, but sometimes you just gotta get on with it

Editor’s Note

Hi Marc.

Thanks for writing in and being so open about things - it’s certainly an opportunity/dilemma that faces most people several times in their working life. Hope this helps you to make a decision in moving forward, and as an added bonus, Kirsty did a great article on a similar question she received few weeks ago in the Ask Kirsty section (3 docs for the price of 2!).

Best of luck mate and let us know how you get on.

Have you found yourself in a similar position to Marc and been able to turn it to your advantage?