Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
Oh the frustrations of being an affiliate marketer and running a online business are the things that happen to make me want to scream!
I’ve been very happy with my work schedule this week and have found that since I followed Zig Ziglar’s 7 step plan I haven’t looked back. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing mind blowing about Zig’s plan but what it did do for me was help me know what my true goals where and more importantly the steps I need to take to achieve them.
Once this was established I have set up a Weekly Work Sheet with just 10 items in order of priority and then settled down to do them. It’s been great so far because I do go off track a lot. I get so many emails and other distractions that I easily lose focus but with my list I find myself back on track.
So here I’ve been merrily reformatting my websites and now two of the pages won’t work properly. No matter what I do the left hand side of the page wants to sit on the right hand side of the page!
What’s even more frustrating is that I can’t see anything wrong with the code or page properties.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a webmaster by any means. I use Dreamweaver and have learnt over the years how to use it through tutorials so I always get frustrated when something like this happens and I know from previous experience it will be something simple.
Anyway the good news is that since I have reformatted and changed the layout on the Florida website www.florida-scubadiving.com I have been receiving more natural search engine traffic.
My plans are to add a new page of fresh original content every day to please Google.
Google now dominates the market and search engines and in my opinion they deserve to. Why? Well from the outset they made a conscious business decision to look after the needs of their customer and let the profits flow later.
They have gone out of their way to provide their customers with what they want … delivering pages with highly relevant content to their search query.
I’ve been very fortunate that since day one I have taught to write for visitors and to let the search engines do their work and the good content and good sites will naturally float to the top. Of course you still have to ensure you are doing everything you can to help Google understand your page.
No-one can tell you what Google’s algorithm’s are actually measuring, there are too many of them and no-one person other than the very top people know them all. Therefore I still do same basic search engine optimization such as … keyword in the title … keyword in the meta tags … keyword in the meta description … and some keyword density and synonyms.
Any good affiliate marketer will tell you that writing for the visitor is the number one rule and the old days of manipulating the search engines has gone but it still helps to construct a web page correctly to give the search engine as much information as possible to determine what the web page is actually about.
I’ve mentioned earlier in the diary that my Florida website Florida scuba diving ranks in the top two on both Yahoo and MSN for the keyword Florida Scuba Diving.
However Google was ranking me somewhere between 300 and 400 and whilst that isn’t bad considering there are 1.2 million results it doesn’t earn you anything. You will realistically only get traffic from the first three result pages with number one page being the most traffic obviously.
I’ve been following James Martell’s advice of uploading one new original page with fresh content every day Monday to Saturday and I did see the ranking jump up from the 400’s to 200 and above.
This morning I couldn’t find it at all and after all the work I have been doing to say I was disappointed would be an understatement. As an affiliate marketer looking for natural traffic to make money online rankings are everything.
So you can imagine the dance and jig I did when I went looking for the site again in Google’s search engine last thing tonight and the reason I couldn’t find it anywhere near ranking 200 was because it was ranked #2!!!!!!
Yes, all that re-organising the website and uploading fresh content so that Google knew the website was alive paid off and it’s now ranked #2 on Google’s search results.
Oh happy days!!
