The Affiliate Truth

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You know I have worked pretty much every single day for the past 2 years in one way or another. This caught up with me a little last week and I was hit by the dreaded Man Flu, as my wife likes to call it! Although near enough ending up in hospital because you feel like crap is no reason to be made fun of but hey!

Anyway The Affiliate Truth vanished for a few days which I can only but apologize for. The domain was up for renewal and I had not realized that the auto renew was not set so the domain company rightly cut the domain.

I am in the process of setting up the physical shop that I mentioned to you all a few weeks back and we currently have over 1200 products on the shop and I can tell you it is not as straight forward as buy a shop and throw everything on! There is so much more to it.

I am working on a check list for starting your own physical business as I go along and hope to have it with you a few weeks after the official launch of the shop.

Just wanted to add a link to the two most popular Pay Per Click engines available to the UK market.

These two engines are where I get 75% of my traffic from and are well recommended!

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I know things here at The Affiliate Truth have been a little quiet in the past few months and with very good valid reasoning. We have been looking at a number of opportunites where we can sell actual physical products though our own websites.

We have purchased a family business to test the process. Now over the past few months we have been pushing a blog that has now over 13,000 monthly readers and 2500 subscribers. The business we have invested in is in the same industry but has no online presence what so ever. Basically what we have purchased is the stock and contacts for suppliers and regular customers. We have tried to keep it as simple as possible but I can tell you buying a business anywhere is a royal pain in the butt!

Our outlay for the business is close to $45,000 but it is a fully functioning business that we have a lot of potential new customers for.

So the plan is in the next few weeks to launch their website as a shop and tie in our blog to link to it in such a way that it starts to pull customers over. Of course we have done a lot more work than just a blog there is also, facebook pages, articles and social bookmarking to take into consideration but we are certain that using the methods we have been perfecting that the physical business can work just as well if not better than the affiliate side of the business. We will be keeping you up to date as the weeks go by!

As the my business moves away from the world of affiliate and internet marketing, I leave behind me a world that I will not be sorry to see a lot less of! In my last post I mentioned the frustrations of the users who use these sites fo their proper use, which is to flag pages that will be of interest to the people who are looking for information on a particular subject. The kind of user I am going to talk about today is a completely different beast but all the more dangerous. I am talking about the user that for no reason what so ever decides that it is their sole purpose in life to make everyone elses experience online a nightmare. Story time again……

I have a close friend who I spend a fair amount of time with due to the fact that she is a member of a club I use a lot for a particular hobby, she is also a close friend of my wife and they have known each other for years. I know that this lady is a heavy internet user and has managed a number websites for her own businesses and been very successful. Over the past few months both my wife and I had mentioned that we had not seen as much of her and that when we did see her and her husband they were very distant with everyone around them, a major change from the norm.

I managed to bump into her husband on our local high street and asked him if he would join me for a coffee. Over what turned out to be several cups of coffee he explained that over the past 3 months their lives had not only been made a misery by what can only be described as a stalker but this individual was destroying their business and their reputation not only online but off it as well.

When I asked what had happened he said they were doing their usual afternoon on the internet forums going from one to another answering questions and giving advice on the business that the both of them knew inside and out. They were also posting their regular articles to their own sites as well as a number of other sites that they guest write for as well as local newspaper. Suddenly they had a message from one of the social media sites saying their account had been blocked for SPAM.

Now had they been the sort of people that would SPAM I would have had no sympathy but what happened next worried the heck out of me. The newspaper that they wrote a weekly article for called them and said it had recieved a complaint about the information they were giving and it had no choice but to pull their weekly slot until they had verification that all was correct. This followed site after site pulling their information, these are repritable websites that have tens of thousands of hits a day.

When I asked if he knew what had happened he said yes, someone had asked a question in one of the forums and the answer that they gave was taken in the wrong context and the person who had asked the original question had not done what most NORMAL people do and reply in the forum saying “I think you might be wrong!” or “I am not sure if you realize but I am a bit upset by your answer!” No this particular nasty idiot went on a rampage to ruin their lives both online and offline.

He found out their company name as it was in the signature at the bottom of their forum posts, he bombarded their offices with spam and pornographic material, he called every company that had ever given them a testimonial or emailed them telling them that they were the worst people on the planet basically. All in all he made their lives hell for 3 months and all they could do is apologize to the people around them for the inconvenience that this person was causing.

They had called the police who said pretty much there was nothing that they could do because the overall attack wasn’t on them personally it was their reputation that was being attacked. They had changed their online account names but every time they started talking in forums this person somehow worked out it was them and instantly flagged them in the forums.

This is the absoulte extreme and in legal terms apparently because there is not much that can be done as they were effectively public figures. Fortunately this particular case has a happy ending which has only come around in the past 3 weeks, the person who had been causing all of the problems has been arrested and charged with wasting police time after making accusations that proved to be completely incorrect.

I am a great believer in karma what goes around comes around and this couple didn’t deserve the beating they took as their business is helping people and a majority of their work came from their reputation and the hard work they put in on their reputation. Now they are pretty much starting again from scratch but the point of the matter is that they can and will, where as the culprit for starting all of this now has a criminal record for their spite.

Seeing what has happened to my friends I can completely understand why people have reservations about going onto social sites such as Myspace and Facebook. Lets face it who hasn’t had a failed relationship where someone got hurt? Who hasn’t once upset a friend at some point? And worse of all who could have let someone down in a way that they would rather forget.

Social Networking is called so because it is “Social” not unsocial, it is for people to get along with others and not get spiteful and stupid. A massive learning curve for a lot of people as it means that they have to learn how to like people and be nice to people for it to work. I am friends with a few ex girlfriends on facebook, I have also met up with old school friends I never thought I would ever hear from again, it is a fantastic tool if used properly. If you feel you can use these tools to get back at people from your past or vent anger then please for your own sake go and see a doctor your not well! Leave those that want to socialize and have a life online as well as offline alone.

As for those running social networking websites you have a responsibility to protect your users from abuse of any kind. Having a disclaimer at the bottom of your website that says you are not responsible is not taking responsibility for this. You don’t have to police your website just be aware of what is going on. At the moment in the UK there is a town where a number of suiscides have been linked to a possible growing cult on a social networking website. Now it doesn’t take a genius to know that these people who run the sites are looking at the commercial aspect of having thousands of people an hour on their websites, with this in mind it should be up to them to have trend falgs in place so that when a particular trend is being followed it throws up red flags to check out what is happening. You can do this and still respect peoples privicy you don’t have to be intrusive you can have word flags. If you are worried about the cost of checking these things then you should reconsider why you are in the business that you are.

Make sure you stay safe online and please BE NICE the world is an ugly enough place as it is it doesn’t need any more hatred.

What am I moaning about now? Basically I am back to stupid people, yep you know the ones, those that should be banned from breathing, those that look at an instruction page as something for others to read, and of course those who just love to waste everyone elses time. Why am I talking about this now? Well allow me to tell you a little story…….

I have a number of blogs that I update a lot more regular than I do this one but the content that goes onto those blogs is thought out and studied as well as in many cases when it is a review I take the time to actually test the products that I review, unlike many people. So it does get to me and I know it shouldn’t as I have in the past gone after those special people at digg for their lack of responsible reading of posts giving things a rough time before they have read the post but today I realized the disease of stupidity has spread……to the one social site I have a great deal of time for…..StumbleUpon.

Stumbleupon sends me traffic, no matter what I seem to do it sends me people to my blogs, they don’t comment often, they hardly ever buy anything but they are people on the blogs and growing the reputation of the words I write. Over the past few weeks I have had a number of posts on reviews on particular products in a niche stumbled by people who read the blogs. Yesterday I had a negative comment from what can only be described as a complete moron, the lowest form of moron, the type that thing they are being clever by offering their comments. Let me quote this guys genius “If I had wanted to read a review on this product I would have searched for it! I would rather read multiple reviews!” BIG THUMBS DOWN next to the review. This particular site has around 150 reviews of different products! (obviously his brain couldn’t get past the fact that he was allowed use more than the normal crayon)

I am fairly thick skinned but this prat got to me, using stumbleupon where YOU CHOOSE the subjects you want to read about! So if you are into knitting and you are stumbling knitting sites and all of a sudden there is a review on the latest knitting needles from Nike should you be surprised at this being there? Should you take the time to abuse a site with your thumbs down? No! And StumbleUpon have now added the ability to put these reviews down as UNHELPFUL! I have added a quick pic so you can see what I mean.

StumbleUpon is a great site and I spend a lot of time stumbling sites reading and giving reviews and I just feel there are too many people hot headed and lacking in ettiquette using social media for the wrong reasons without understanding how they actually work.

Moan over :o)

For years now I have been spending money on pay per click through Yahoo UK where I have had some fantastic success and would advise anyone to advertise on the network (the clicks have a good conversion rate) and Google Adwords, where the conversion rate I found was not so good. However I have found a great way to get amazing value for money and it is called StumbleUpon!

So why is it such good value? Well if you pay for lets say 100 visits, you can get that for around $5 (Yes thats right $5, five dollars! FIVE BUCKS!) so whats the advantage over the others? Well simple, the way StumbleUpon works is through visitors giving your site a thumbs up and in some cases a good review, the more thumbs up you get the more traffic you will get. So if you send through 100 visitors and you get 5 thumbs up through those 100 visits the likelihood is that you will get close to 500 visits. I can’t say for certain that these figures are completely correct but based on what I have experienced it is around that.

So not only do you actually get the visits that your promised by the ad program you get more than you actually pay for in visits you get more exposure to getting thumbs up and in doing that you get more and more visitors. The visits that you get are for people who are actually interested in the subject of your website. So if you have a travel website and you set up a campaign then you will get visitors interested in travel! Targeted visitors!

Now this isn’t a way to get a massive number of sales your content and your product still needs to be of value and top notch otherwise you are going to lose out as you will get thumbs downs which is bad news all around!

So as always your content needs to be good and your design being pleasant on the eye also helps but as with all websites make sure it adds value to your users life and you will get good results!

I have today received a message from someone in Brazil who has said that apparently “I write for adsense not for common people!” I have two things to say about this:

Firstly if you can find an adsense advert anywhere on this blog please let me know because I sure as hell didn’t put the thing here! I put up the occasional offer that I come across on this blog but I don’t write on here for adsense. Some other blogs that I have are written for adsense but they would not have been associated with this blog in any way.

Secondly the readers of this blog and the subscribers are in no way shape or form common and I resent the fact that anyone should say that I should write for common people!

Snob in me coming out a little but I think this particular person was looking for an argument and the fact that I am not going to rise to the bait and have a discussion with someone from Brazil (who I might like to say has got adsense ads on his blog) when I know my readers are better than that.

So coming up in the next few months are some new methods that have taken one of our new websites from a few hundred hits a day all the way up to tens of thousands of hits a day in under two months. No SEO or paid ads in any of this.

I have never claimed to be an SEO god or put myself forward as someone who can manipulate my way to the top of Google in a matter of days, however I have always managed to do ok out of it.

I have just read a great report from Jon Leger who puts a lot of the old Myths about getting a ranking in Google, Yahoo and MSN into a completely different perspective.  The report is totally free and available for download here for the bargain price of free it is well worth a read.

Being on a billion mailing lists I get a lot of SPECIAL (cough splutter) offers though that promise me the earth and of course never deliver. I always make a special attempt to read through what is on offer even though I never buy the bonus reports etc that are being sold.

Today I recieved one that firstly wished me Happy New Year! Very nice thank you. Then it said there was a special back door automated system that was unvocered in a special report! (lost interest already but would take a look) I get to the page and I am guessing that it is around 2 A4 sides of sales page with an extra 10% off if I buy within a minute!!! OK now I don’t know about you but I like to take my time over reading these things and ensure that I get the right picture of the product.

Knowing I would never get to the bottom of the page with in a minute and having totally lost interest I clicked to close the window and then deleted the email. Potential customer LOST!

Offer VALUE and do not PRESSURE your visitors and you will get happier and more reliable customer. Treat them well with sensible offers and it will be more likely that you will get someone to return to your website over and over.