Affiliate Newbie - Advice Needed

[darrenw]

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Hi All,

This is my first post in this forum, so please be gentle with me!

I'm very much a newbie to the affiliates world, having started on a couple of websites about five weeks ago.

My most recent site (www.searchshopsonline.co.uk) is based on the ShopWindow script from www.affiliatewindow.com - I decided that this would give me the most initial basic functionality, and I would use this base to build upon.

This site has been "live" for about a week now, and I haven't had any real traffic yet.

I would be very grateful for any advice or suggestions from the more experienced members who read this forum.

I've traded a few links by emailing a few other webmasters to get my Google PR up, and the googlebot is a regular visitor (according to my stats). What else should I be doing to get some real traffic? Or should I be more patient? I believe I have one page indexed in Google at the moment.

The first site I wrote about five weeks ago (more as a test - a toe in the water) is www.lowcreditcards.co.uk - this hasn't had any real traffic yet either - any comments on this site would also be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Darren.

[qwerky]

OK here goes

Your credit card site is 99% adsense on my pc there are simply no results on your pages? site looks really good though.

Your shoppping site looks good as well but have you ever tried using the search from AW? try searching for pink shoes and you get pots of paint two bad searches if i was a visitor and im off.

Like i say both site look very good, but both seem to not work to me from a surfers point of view.

[Ballswinger]

Hey,

Nice looking site with potential, my suggestion would be to categorize your merchant directory rather than alphabetically.

Not all visitors know the name of the merchant, rather the product they are looking for. If you add sub-pages for the individual categories before they hit the ShopWindow then there's even more chance for product specific google indexing.

Just a thought

Andrew

[tshirtsuntan]

Thats a good point.

It WILL bring in more visitors from search engines if you tightly categorise your merchant directory.

Also make sure each categorisation page has been optimised individually with use of relevant meta tags and title tags.

The key is to keep everything relevant, specific and individualised.

The search engines love it.

Sites look nice

PS. Perhaps change the images you're using as links to specific and relevant textlinks.

Example: change the "links" image to "credit card directory" as text.

As you know, the key to SEO is specificity........

[darrenw]

Thanks for the feedback - it is appreciated.

I will take all your comments on board. In particular the point about the AW search being a bit "odd"! I could offer some additional search features where the user could also limit the search by product category or individual merchant - that should be fairly easy to implement.

The site has been "live" for just over a week now - Google is aware of it (one page) and googlebot has visited over 400 pages over the last week - how long should I realistically expect to see search results start to appear in Google?

Is there anything else I should be doing to increase traffic?

I'm genuinely worried that I will never get any "real" traffic!

Thanks,
Darren.

[tshirtsuntan]

You should be actively seeking out websites that are related but not competing with your site and emailing them to encourage links to your site.

Just explain who you are, what your website is and how placing a link to your website on theirs will benefit their customers by offering an additional valuable service at no cost to them etc.

Just simply ask for links and you may receive.

You will be faced with rejection but you will also receive links with perseverence.

There are plenty of articles out there on writing such emails to people. You can probably even find pre-written emails to copy and paste.

You could possibly search for "Joint Venture Emails" and customise them for your purpose.

But just make sure you personalise it as much as possible so the webmaster knows its not spam and is a genuine proposal.

Use first names and insert features of their website where possible.

Hope this helps.

Tshirt

[samsonthomas]

Hi darrenw,

If you are looking at SEO traffic, I think you should be blogging / submitting articles for backlinks. You can potentially have hundreds of articles based on each shopping category and then use an article submitter to submit to various article sites.

Alternatively, you can prepare 2-3 min video clips for popular categories and submit to video sharing sites like you tube, tubemogul, etc with links back to your site.

You can use web 2.0 properties like squidoo, hugpages, wetpaint, etc - post your articles there and link back to your site. I think these steps will help better than asking for links from webmasters.

Also, considering your site subject, you could try UK based free classified sites for additional traffic.

I like your shopping site, although as a viewer I would have loved ranking / review of shops, promotional coupons, etc. I think the credit card site needs a serious image makeover. The color combination to me looks gaudy - a finance site would look professional and just great with white background and black font.

Hope this helps.