I'm currently seeing pleasing results promoting Channel 4's 4oD via TradeDoubler. 4oD is a free TV catch up service, allowing users to watch programmes from the Channel 4 archives. It's very useful for watching shows you missed, it's free and best of all, Channel 4 will pay you a pound for each user that downloads it. Seriously, does affiliate marketing get any easier than that: you have a great product, available for free and it's something users will want when they know about it or might be looking for anyway.

Similarly, Firefox via Adsense Referrals. Firefox is a great app. Chances are that you'd recommend it for free anyway, but Mozilla/Google are willing to give you up to a dollar for each person that downloads it. Some people have to go door to door trying to flog things to people who don't really want them. All you have to do with Firefox is tell people how cool it is and they can download it for free. And if you're going to link to Firefox, why not "upsell" them to the Google Pack, which contains Firefox and other good stuff like Picassa, Google Earth etc and has a payout of up to $2.

A few years ago you could get 50p for promoting Yahoo! Messenger on TradeDoubler. Again, a useful tool that people are actively looking for everyday - all you had to do was guide them in the right direction.

Finding programs which pay you to promote genuinely good tools that are available for free is a real no brainer. Sometimes there's "free" things you can promote but you wouldn't really want to promote them other than for the commision, but when it's a genuinely great resource, like 4oD, or Firefox, or Google Pack, it really is a wonderful thing to get paid to promote it. Have you got any examples of really useful free products/downloads that have a payout attached?

A while ago I was thinking how friends were telling me about other friends who were coining it in from the online adult entertainment arena. Not wanting to miss out, I toyed with the idea of some kind of adult site myself, but to be honest I'm a little bit squeamish about all that, and it seemed I'd have to get special adult hosting and it just seemed like something I should steer clear off.

But, I could see there was money to be made here and I found a middle route that allowed me to make regular money from adult links without having a direct hand in adult sites myself.

Here's what I did...

I went to an adult site and looked for a "performer" that featured prominently - one that was perhaps being pushed as a bit of a star of the site. To a large extent you have to follow your nose and your intuition here. I gather there will often be one or two "fan favourites" and the rest will be a lot of filler.

Then I registered a Blogger blog in the format adult-star's-name.blogspot.com, and wrote about 8 blog posts that featured content about the particular performer. I did a introduction post, a bio post (using information gleaned from the adult site) and I did various "reviews" which basically consisted of reading the synopsis of individual films on the site, reaching for my porn thesaurus and getting a bit of creative. The adult in site in question provide to their affiliates a number of screenshots which I took and cropped to make them actually not at all offensive but suggestive enough to be a hook to the interested punters.

Before uploading the pictures, I renamed them artist-name.jpg, artist-name-2.jpg etc. Each post I wrote on the blog ended with a message along the lines of "To see more, click here" etc.

The next step was to get it indexed on Google. It's not the kind of site I would want to link to from most of my sites, but because I had cropped all the photos so that they weren't particularly offensive at all, I did find a couple of links pages on a couple of my sites where a link could be appropriately placed.

I sat back and waited and it wasn't long before it was indexed, and most promisingly of all, it was showing prominently on Google Images. Since then, a steady stream of commissions have come through as people have signed up for the website which has the main content. I think I first knew it was getting traffic when I started emails from people who somehow couldn't read the disclaimer that this was an unofficial fan site, and though they were emailing the performer themselves, and offering all sorts.

Traffic has actually jumped the last couple of days because Google has recognised the fairly innocuous name as a search term that people often want images for, and are now showing three images at the top of the first page of search results, and with two of them being from my site, I'm effectively the number one result for the search term. Unfortunately the third image is from someone who wasn't so careful at cropping their images and it's actually full frontal nudity and it's showing on Google results even with SafeSearch which is a real flaw in their system I think.

So there you go, follow those steps yourself if you have the stomach for it and you should be able to replicate my success and get a nice little income from the world of adult entertainment without having to immerse yourself too far. The site is making me about $150-$200 a month, which I'm happy with.

Labels: adult site project

I was recently sent a copy of the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan to review, by its creators, Purple Internet Marketing. The easy thing with this would be to tell you it's the best thing since sliced bread and stick an affiliate link at the bottom and hope to get some sales. But this blog is the closest I have to a personal blog, so I want to give a completely credible review and have decided to eschew any affiliate links so that I can deliver an unbiased review.

First up, here's what it's included in the plan: 4 workbooks, 4 DVDs, 7 interview CDs, a materials CD (containing PDF reports), a plan poster and a t-shirt. The plan is broken up into 4 phases, as follows:

Phase 1: Website Structure

• Business Strategy
• Keyword Research
• Site Architecture
• Conversion Rates
• Viral Coefficient
• Visitor Tracking

Phase 2: Automation and Launch

• Blogging
• RSS
• Email Updates
• Blog Communities
• Blog & RSS Directories
• Press Releases
• Pay Per Click

Phase 3: Broaden Your Base

• Major Directories
• Industry Directories
• Local Directories
• Article Marketing
• Competitor Backlinks
• Forum Interaction
• Blog Comments

Phase 4: Broaden Your Horizon

• New Website
• Social Networking
• MyPage Marketing
• Podcasting
• Video Marketing
• Visitor Analysis

The interview CDs feature lengthy interviews with:

• Matt Trimmer
• Brad Fallon
• Yaro Starak
• Jeff Walker
• Timothy Seward
• Jonathan Farrington
• Shawn Collins

Who is the 26 week internet marketing plan really aimed at?
According to the workbook, "it is the marketing function within the business. It is people who are Marketing directors, people who are in charge of the strategy within their businesses."

I have to be honest, I didn't have 26 weeks to spare so I haven't actually followed the entire course exactly as the creators would have intended. What I have done is watch one of the DVDs (about an hour and a half long), read a couple of the workbooks and listened to a couple of the interview CDs.

I'll start by saying what I liked about it. The DVDs, which basically have footage of the presenter, David Bain, delivering the course to a group, is well presented. David comes across as a genial presenter, able to explain subjects reasonably well when he isn't getting caught up in jargon like "Viral Coefficient". He obviously has the requisite knowledge to present on the subject, and is also able to field questions from the group effectively - and sometimes the questions are the best bits.

David, whose accent leads me to believe is Scottish, doesn't make many grandiose claims and is fairly modest and realistic in what the followers of the plan should be looking to achieve; talking about optimising the homepage for visitor numbers in the hundreds, and discussing the merits of creating a page which might only attract 7 visitors a day through it's long tail keyword optimisation, but that will be 7 visitors a day for the lifetime of the site, for one page, for perhaps a couple of hours spent writing the article.

The "plan" certainly includes a great deal of useful information about various aspects of creating, optimising and promoting a website. It won't be new to experienced hands, but if you've not created a website before, I can tell you that the advice provided here is generally of a high standard.

One of the things that I guess worries people when buying hard copy materials relating to the web is whether or not the stuff will become dated soon. The 26 Week Plan plan is well up to date, with discussion of Facebook marketing included in Workbook 4.

The interview CDs are also a nice addition to the package, with some genuinely good listens in there.

Ok, so were there things about the plan that I wasn't so impressed with? There was a point in the course when I was a bit puzzled by exactly who this was aimed at. If your reader/viewer needs to have it explained to them what a page title is, is it really appropriate to casually drop in a very technical term like "mod rewrite" shortly after. And personally I don't think you can mention mod rewrite without then explaining that it is for Apache web server, so its not even suitable for Microsoft-centric setups.

There's a section in the book and DVD dedicated to Alt Tags. The eagle eyed amongst you will note that there's no such thing as Alt Tags, but there is an "alt" attribute on the "img" tag. Ok, so that's pedantry on my part because "alt tags" is a commonly, but incorrectly used term, but £399 is a lot to spend and I do think the price demands accuracy.

Discussing URL formatting, the plan says "It's generally thought that URLs don't matter massively when it comes to search engine optimization". Now, I'm sorry. I did nearly fall off my chair when I read that because I would strongly disagree with it as I tend to think the structure of the URL does actually matter. if I was advising someone who was creating a website, I would give it much more importance than it gets here.

The workbooks are basically transcripts of the DVD. To be honest, that seemed like an opportunity missed. I expected them to complement each other better - the book could have been a place to summarise, test and measure progress, and record objectives based on what had been covered. Instead, they simply mirror each other. There is a blank "Action Plan" page after each section but that's not particularly helpful. I just felt something was lacking - some kind of guide I guess to the actions suggested as a result of what had been covered.

The trouble with recommending something like this you have to bear in mind there's nothing new or revelatory in here. You could learn most, if not all, of this for free by reading around the internet but then again you have to remember, for some people, reading loads of websites with conflicting information and trying to extract the right conclusions isn't easy, so actually a resource like this which brings all the relevant conclusions together in once place can be really beneficial.

In my opinion, I have to say I don't think this works that well as an actual 26 week plan as I don't think the structure is really there for that - other than the fact each chapter is titled Week 1, Week 2 etc, I don't get how it's supposed to relate to a week's worth of information or actions. Despite the suggestion on the introductory MP3, I'd imagine most people would just read it straight through.

What it does do well, is give you some very good information which you can use to make a website which has a fair chance of succeeding. Would I recommend it? What I would say is that if you have a training budget available to you, and you want to learn what factors are required to create a traffic generating website without having to exhaustively hunt around the net for same information, this is a resource worth considering.

You can find out more by visiting the 26 Week Marketing Plan website.

I don't know why but I got to thinking about what would happen if making money online was no longer an option, and would I still want to creates or sites or write a blog. Back when I started out, making money didn't figure in my thoughts at all.

It wasn't long after getting online at the end of 1997 that I started to think about creating my own web pages. AOL members had a small allocation of webspace and I wanted to put something, anything, up just to be able to have created some kind of online content.

I started off with a little film review website, giving my opinions on a selection of classic films and using the opportunity to re-use an essay I had written about the movie Casablanca and its use a propaganda tool for my media studies course. An eclectic bunch of sites followed; a Roger Moore tribute site, a Tommy Boyd fan site and just a general mish mash of creativity and fun that amounted to nothing particularly significant. Back then, I don't recall having the slightest interest in site analytics, or even whether the pages were listed on search engines. In fact, I was mostly interested in having pages I could show to friends and didn't expect strangers to be looking at the pages at all. If an unexpected message was posted to my guestbook, it was a pleasant surprise.

In retrospect, it was all so innocent and it was simply fun. I was making pages simply to satisfy my own desire to be creative. So to answer my own question: would I be creating web content if I couldn't make money from it? Yes, I almost certainly would because I still have that desire to put stuff I've made "out there". Would I be making content about the things I end up making it about now, such as personalised gifts and hypnosis MP3s? No, I don't think so.

One of the things I guess I would like to do is recapture the fun of making content for the love of creating stuff and not be quite so concerned with monetising, although that's of course easier said than done when you're trying to make a living too. I don't even know what I could make a site about now for fun, since monetising content has kind of consumed me and that has itself become my major interest.

What about you dear reader? Do you make websites because you like making websites, or do you do it purely to make money? If you couldn't make another penny from the internet, would you find another reason to publish websites or would you just go and do something else?

Posts have been slow here lately mostly because I haven't had much to say and I've been pre-occupied with making two important decisions - what new phone to get, and what new car to get.

New Phone

Choosing a phone is such a hassle. You know you're going to tie yourself into a long contract and there's always better phones which are just about to come out so it's a tough decision to make. I had been dithering for months and suffering with large phone bills as a result as I was on a contract no longer suitable for the minutes I needed, so I decided to just make a decision and stop wasting time thinking too much. I plumped for the Sony Ericsson K850i. To be honest, it was probably a mistake. The buttons are really unpleasant to use, making fast texting hard, and it has three touch sensitive buttons which are fairly unpredictable and can be very annoying when they don't recognise they are being pressed. On the up side, it has HSDPA so I can get good broadband speeds on my laptop through the data cable, and a 5mp camera.

New Car

My much loved Audi A3 1.8T had been with me for six years and it was starting to suffer from a few faults inside which made driving it unpredictable and frankly I decided I needed something a bit more up to date. A safe option would be to stick with what I knew and got myself another A3, but I fancied something different and went for the Volvo C30, and picked it up on Saturday. I think it looks great, especially in black with the sports body kit.



It's perhaps not as much fun to drive as the A3 that I had, but it's a very smooth drive and it's nice to be back in a nearly new car since mine was showing visible signs of ageing. It was also great to be able to buy the car outright from my affiliate income and not have to use any credit to fund the purchase.

Bhs recently launched on Affiliate Window and Commission Junction, and Equator ran a launch promotion whereby the first 10 affiliates to sign up and get links displayed would win a £25 gift voucher. Luckily, I was one of the first 10 to get a link up and won a voucher - I knew there was a reason I did this full time!



So many thanks to Bhs and Tara at Equator. I received the voucher in the week and went shopping today. I got a new toaster as mine broke in the week (perfect timing), and I got a teapot because... well, it was the only thing I could see for £5, and who knows maybe I'll start making a pot of tea whilst I ponder over ways in which I can better promote Bhs.

The only blot on an otherwise pleasant experience was that when I went to pay for the the toaster, the sales assistant told me "If you have any problems after 28 days, you need to fill out the slip and contact the manufacturer". Of course, that's complete rubbish because under the Sale Of Goods Act, my contract of sale is with Bhs and if there's any problems within a reasonable time, I'll take it back to them. If there's one thing that really annoys me, it's shops that make statements which completely fly in the face of your statutory rights. But hey, if there's a lesson to be learned maybe it's this: always buy online and miss out the weakest link in the retail chain - the staff!

A little while ago I shared with you my experience of buying some paid reviews for a website of mine.

Everything was going quite nicely until a few weeks ago I googled the website name and the homepage was no longer showing in the Google index. Sub pages from the site were showing up, but the homepage seemed to have disappeared on any keyword search which would previously have brought it up. It hadn't just lost its position, it had seemingly disappeared from the index on those search terms.

Now, I have quite a few websites and I've never ever had that happen before. The only thing about this site which was different was that I had used paid reviews, so it seemed likely to me that the site had suffered some kind of penalty. I did a bit of reading up on this kind of thing, and got some good advice from Richard at Quality Nonsense, and realised I had to get rid of those paid reviews.

Easier said than done. I didn't have any direct contact details for the bloggers, so started posting comments on their blogs which seemed to go ignored. I used their Contact forms and still couldn't get any joy. Eventually, one of them replied. She wasn't at all suprised at my predicament as she told me she thought she had just been penalised herself, with her Google PageRank being wiped out. She agreed to take the link to my relief. That was one down, one to go but this second blogger was proving to even more elusive. My comments on his blog were still not making it onto the site or getting a response to him. I got his details from the whois records of the domain and sent emails and still I heard nothing.

At this point I was getting irritated and started googling the guy's name. I felt I was getting closer to my target when I got a new email address. I was feeling pretty surly at this point and my email was terse and my feelings quite clear. Only problem was, it wasn't the same person - just another blogger with the same name - and this child (yes, I was reduced to sending shitty emails to a child!) kindly replied to tell me he had never sold links in his life and didn't know what I was talking about.

When I saw new posts on the guys blog, I knew he hadn't been run over by a bus so I decided to step things up a gear. In a pincer movement, I tried to add him to my MSN, I generated "forgotten password" messages for the admin account on his blog, and sent him one more email reminding him I hadn't actually left feedback *yet* on the paid link service I used. I wanted him to feel some heat. Within an hour, he emailed me back to apologise for the delay and the link was removed. Phew!

With the links gone, I went to the "reconsideration request" form at Webmaster Central and wrote offered a full mea culpa to Google. I explained I now realised the error of my ways and would never be so foolish again.

A week or so later, my site's homepage was back in the index for all the search terms I expected to bring it up. I don't know if it just automatically picked up on the fact the links were gone, or if my email was effective, or if both played a part. But the cloud had been lifted and I was happy.

The irony of all this is that I have my fair share of sites which are not much cop, but this particular site was a real pain staking labour of love with all orginal content which I gathered and created. I was just so keen to expedite its growth, I chose the wrong path. So if you're thinking of buying links to your sites from any paid link or review services, bear this cautionary tale in mind...

By the way....

Is anyone watching Damages on BBC One on Monday nights? It really is the best thing on the TV at the moment!

Labels: paid links