Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
Today it’s down to basics. Some of the work we have to do as affiliate marketers is not glamorous and can be downright boring.
Take today for example. From what I learnt at The System there is a lot of re-organising of my Florida website florida scuba diving which has been screaming for an overhaul for some time.
I’ve taken a look at it and decided that the menu needs to be move from the left and placed on the right hand side below the fold. This will allow for the articles to feature more prominently and leave plenty of space for Google Adsense which I have not fully implemented before.
This slow process involves a lot of copy and paste actions but I’m making steady progress and besides, it gives me the opportunity to look at each page and see if there is anything I wish to add or remove from the content.
This website was set up with search engine optimization in mind and for the most part it has worked well. The main keyword ‘Florida Scuba Diving’ ranks one or two on both Yahoo and MSN but has only reached the top 300 on Google.
Whilst this may be considered ‘not bad’ considering Google returns 1.2 million search results it is still not where it needs to be, on page one of the search results.
Having listened to James Martell on the DVD the other day I shouldn’t be surprised and I shouldn’t be disappointed considering I haven’t been uploading pages on a daily basis and I haven’t submitted any articles.
One of the keys to successful ranking on Google is fresh daily original content. Now I already know this but have drifted away from the practice as I have started up other websites.
What makes it worse is that I know the minute I start adding content to the site then the website will start climbing the rankings again.
I also need to write some articles for the Florida site which will really push it up the rankings but for now I need to concentrate on improving the layout and adding the Google Adsense code to the pages.
#@$*! …. I’ve just realized that in my haste to update the pages I have overwritten the Google Analytics code on 70 of the pages and all of these will have to be checked and uploaded again. Teach me to concentrate.
I’ll be glad when I can sub-contract work like this with Elance.com but for now I want full control of the websites so I have to do all the work myself.
It’s when you’re doing the tedious work like this you remember that working for yourself from home isn’t necessarily all chocolates and roses. There’s a lot of ordinary things to be done each day as you build your online business.
However, I must admit that I still get the satisfaction of seeing the websites grow and develop and my income with it so as they say there’s no gain without pain and at least working for myself I control how much pain I want to inflict!
It’s been a good days work even if it was a bit tedious.
