I downloaded Google Chrome, I don’t know what made me do it, I know I wanted to see how my sites look in the browser. I may have read something that convinced me. Anyway, there are positives and negatives and you may recognise some:

Positives

It’s super fast. Having used IE7 for years the first thing you notice is Chrome is lightning fast. I’d heard it was fast but they always did Javascript tests so I thought it was just fast at dealing with Javascript enquiries. But no it handles everything fast and I mean browsing is a pleasure at such a fast pace. It’s almost like going from dial up to broadband (well that’s a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea, it’s fast).

I like the way it stores your passwords. It asks when you enter a password at a new website if you want chrome to remember it. Ok this isn’t unusual but the new thing I haven’t seen before is that it automatically enters your user name and password when you go back to the site. All if have to do is click the site login button to enter, you don’t have to do any typing, I like that.

When it crashes it remembers the sites you were on even if there were multiple tabs open. So when you re-open chrome it asks if you want to restore. You say yes and all the tabs open and you’re back where you were. It’s a nice little feature.

Negatives

I don’t like the way that when you make a change to your bookmarks it doesn’t keep the menu open it abruptly closes it. So you just move a bookmark to a different folder and as soon as you’ve let the mouse button go, the whole thing closes. This feels like some sort of error at first and it definitely needs changing.

It crashes a lot. I’m starting to see the chrome has crashed pop up an awful lot. We’re talking just about once every hour last night. It actually got annoying at one point and made me think why am I using this thing. I’ve turned on the reporting to Google option so when it does crash Google knows about it. I just think if this is normal then they must be getting millions of crash notifications from people on the web.

No Pagerank. There’s something about that little green bar as a webmaster I love to see how big it is on new sites. It’s not just about an importance of a web page to me it’s about the reputation of a website. I now always have a tab open with a Pagerank checker so I can get the Pagerank of a web page. This is something that must be sorted in my opinion and all it takes is a simple add on.

Conclusion

The positives outweigh the negatives for me. I’ve been using it for a week now and I’ll keep it as my main browser from now on. It’s the speed that does it, my attention span is really short so this suits me down to the ground.

Well it’s the day after, it’s 3 pm, I should’ve been working all day but all I’ve been doing is listening to Bruce Springsteen CD’s. He played some classics last night. Bruce Springsteen came to London and he rocked it.

Springsteen played Glastonbury the night before and he put in a 3 hour master class that had Glastonbury on it’s knees. I thought surely he couldn’t put the same intensity into the performance 2 nights in a row? Was I stupid? Of course he can, this is Bruce Springsteen, he’s been doing it for years!

Springsteen made his first appearance on the day when he joined The Gaslight Anthem at around 3pm. The lead singer said that it was one of the perks of being a fellow New Jersey boy and was clearly star struck at having Bruce join him for his song “59 sound”.

What I liked is that it was near to the beginning of the event so people were still entering. I could see some of them point at the big screen showing Bruce Springsteen playing yet he still wasn’t due for another 4 hours. Some of them recognised him while others carried on not realising that maybe the person they’d come to see had made an impromptu appearance.

Springsteen and the E street band came on to do their set at around 19:15 or a bit later they were due to start at 19:00 but I guess you’ve got to expect them to be a little behind in preparation.

London Calling by The Clash was the opener and well received in the crowd. The following is the set list as tweeted by Bruce Springsteen’s official twitter feed:

London Calling
Badlands
Night
She’s The One
Outlaw Pete
Out In The Street
Working On A Dream
Seeds
Johnny 99
Youngstown
Good Lovin’
Bobby Jean
Trapped
No Surrender
Waiting On A Sunny Day
Promised Land
Racing In The Street
Radio Nowhere
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born To Run

Rosalita
Hard Times
Jungleland
American Land
Glory Days
Dancing In The Dark

Musical highlights

• Badlands – Great to hear this live and a real crowd participation number. The crowd also sang this at the very end of the night
• Out In The Street – A great anthem and everyone joined in the chorus
• Youngstown – One of my personal favourites, it was great to hear it live
• Trapped – This sounded great and went down a storm, one of the best performances of the night
• No Surrender – Bruce was joined by The Gaslight Anthem’s leading man to repay the favour Bruce did by joining him earlier. This sounds great sung by 2 people
• The Promised Land – One of my personal favourites it was great to see Clarence Clemons give his all on the saxophone
• The Rising – This sounded great live and a stand out performance
• Rosalita – To hear this live was brilliant, one of his oldest and best tracks
• Jungleland – The highlight of the evening for me, hearing this live was a gift
• Dancing In The Dark – This song got me hooked on Springsteen in 1985, loved it live after all these years

Musical lowlights

• Outlaw Pete – The younger parts of the crowd went for this one but I wasn’t impressed
• Racing In The Street – This is great on the album but live it drags a bit
• No Thunder Road – This was played at Glastonbury last night, I’d love to have heard it at Hard Rock Calling
• Nothing from the Tunnel Of Love album – I’d love to have heard a full band rendition of Tougher Than The Rest or Spare Parts

Funny moments

Bruce slipped over a couple of times and was humble enough to make a joke of it. This delighted the crowd and especially Steve Van Zandt who had great pleasure in playfully mocking his long time friend.

Bruce took many banners from the crowd and it was strange at first because you wondered what he was doing.  For about 30 seconds he went round happily taking banners from people. It became apparent when he would display the banner with the title of the song he would play. NJ.com’s official Bruce Springsteen blog suggests these songs were only played because of these requests. I’d love that to be true.

The Bruce Springsteen fan

The passion is still there even in the younger generation of which there were many who clearly have discovered Bruce from his latest albums and they really appreciate his later work. They know the words and they know what they like. It was a pleasure to be amongst them.

The venue

What I like was that all the prices were fixed and were displayed on the Hard Rock Calling website in advance. It was £3.50 for a burger and you got a decent burger. It was £3.50 for a 500 ml 4.2% beer which is pretty good for central London. Thee beer sponsor was Tuborg and they were really pushing this beer to the people.

The bars had so much staff you didn’t have to wait a second to get served, it was really well organised with “supervisors” calling out to waiting staff to have their hands up to serve as many people as they can. The beer was clearly flowing, people were carrying crates of beer around the venue and there were some who definitely had one too many.

I felt sorry for this one guy who had too much to drink he was singing every song to his wife and was just looking at her the whole time and not the stage. He was falling about a bit and I don’t think he could have enjoyed the night to it’s potential. I doubt if he even remembered much of it.

Overall

This was a classic Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band rock performance. They played only 2 tracks from latest album making this far more of a greatest hits show rather than an album tour. I for one am glad, sure the latest albums got some great tracks. I’m listening to it now and it’s growing on me.

I like the way Bruce matches his performance to the venue. I saw him at The Royal Albert Hall which is an intimate indoor venue and Bruce perfectly played an intimate set. An outdoor festival demands a rock performance to please an often eclectic crowd and that’s exactly what we got. I’m sure his performances at Glastonbury and Hard Rock Calling earned Springsteen many new fans and revitalised the old ones. I am now fully revitalised.

When it comes to domain names for affiliate marketing we need keywords. We’re not looking to build a unique brand or service here so some fancy word that doesn’t appear on the dictionary isn’t necessary.

It needs to describe the content within

If the domain is treadmills.com then it needs to feature treadmills and that’s all it should have. It’s no good having elliptical trainers in this domain Google isn’t expecting it and it will confuse your visitors and Google doesn’t like confused visitors. If your domain is FitnessEquipment.com then you’re going to have to feature all kinds of fitness equipment. It’s what your visitors will expect and so Google will want this too.

The more niche you go the less content you commit yourself to writing. Take the domain: DietDelivery.com, a domain like this is going to have to be informational as well as have details about the services in the niche. If it was DietDeliveryServices.com then it could just be about the services. Think about how much work you really want to give yourself.

Don’t get obsessed about the traffic volume of the domain name

This is a classic issue, everyone goes for the domain name that has the most searches. The thing is people don’t generally buy through the front page, it’s too generic, they buy after landing on an internal page and these internal pages are far more profitable than a generic phrase.

An example is LadiesFashion.co.uk with 15,000 searches every month. While this sounds good don’t expect to make much money from a 1 page site even if you rank number 1 for “ladies fashion”. Your conversion rate from people finding you with the phrase “ladies fashion” I reckon would be less than 0.5%.

However if you had an internal page about Jaeger overcoats and someone found it with that phrase it will convert higher and be more profitable. It’s the searches for the model and brand that earn the most money so with LadiesFashion.co.uk I would go more niche with the domain name.

A little personal tip

Review sites generally work with Google, you’re getting someone near the end of the buying cycle and you can do a nice recommendation to convince them to buy. Consider adding the word “reviews” to your domain name. People search for “product review” in Google. This way you catch people typing the singular and plural of the word and Google gives a word more weight when it’s in the domain name.

One example of mine is FitnessEquipmentReviews.net. All the pages are reviews of various fitness equipment by model. I don’t have to put the word review in the page name as it’s already in the domain name. I would put “model Review” as the title and just put “model” as the h1 tag on the page. This is really effective for me at the moment and something you may want to try.

I attribute my success (if doing this full time is success) in affiliate marketing to experience. Actually making websites and learning from them. I’ve read ebooks, forums, blogs you name it. None of it really helped, you just have to get down and do it.

Forum posts

It amazes me with the forum posts I read. People will ask:

• Will this domain work?
• Is this a good niche?
• Why isn’t this site earning?
• How much content do I write?

The only way you’re really going to find out the answer to these questions is by building the sites in the first place. Something may work for one person and not another. It’s about numbers, you’ll have sites fail, even the best affiliate marketers have sites fail or don’t earn to expectations. You simply analyse the reasons and make the next one.

Don’t be scared to move on

When you’ve built a site there’s only so much you can do to it to make it convert better or rank higher. By all means always build links to well performing sites but as far as tweaking content don’t bother. When you feel you want to do this stop and start building a new website.

Once you start building multiple websites it gets easier and easier. You get more confident and you end up building your perfect website from the beginning and you don’t need to tweak it at all. You just let them be, build more links, earn the money and move on. It may earn a lot, it may not. You simply go on to the next website.

Build a 10 to 30 page website with at least 300 words on every page

For your site to have the maximum ranking and earning potential put a decent amount of content on every page. Simply pick a niche your passionate about then build a website around a phrase in that niche. Funny thing is when the money rolls in you can become passionate about any niche.

Simply choose a domain that doesn’t violate a trademark or copyright (the affiliate network will just kick you off the program), review their products or provide advice. Then write 300 words at least on every page. Don’t lie about the product or service be honest and persuasive. Use H1 tags where appropriate and the sales will come. Once this is done make the next website.

Make one after another

As you keep making websites you start to learn what works and what doesn’t. Then you can apply this to a new website or niche. If you find site that works really well, build another. Target the niche from a different angle or focus on part of the niche. There are search results in Google where I have 5 out of the first 6 results. Google doesn’t mind as long as you provide good content for the customer.

Not every site will succeed. That’s why you simply spend a week or so building a site then if it doesn’t earn so much what have you lost? Nothing, you’ve learnt to leave that niche and move on. If a website makes say £40 per month for a weeks work. After 10 weeks that’s £400 per month. One of those websites should hit big and make £300 to £500 per month.

Just take action

As you can see everything that’s written here is about making more and more websites. By all means do some research to make sure the niche is worth going for but you can only do so much before you have to take a step. And taking the step is the best research anyway.

It’s hard work, don’t think you can just do a data feed site and it will earn money it won’t. You’re going to have to write content. When I did this part time it was like working another 2 hours a day. It’s hard but it pays off. Make an effort with your sites and you will be rewarded. Just take action, build the website and when it’s built, build another. It’s a numbers game, the more you make the more chances to win.

As you can see by “My sites” in the right sidebar I link to all of my sites. What you may not know is they all link back here. Some are interlinked between themselves but the majority just link here. This way I can re-distribute the rankings between each website.

Some of the websites have hundreds of external links pointing to them and others have hardly any. To give them the maximum potential to make money I want them to have the highest rankings possible, so they’re all linked back out from this blog. Jimmy asked in a comment here and the a4u forums what he should do with his own name domain. Well this is what he should do. It doesn’t need to be a blog just a website with content.

Some may think Google would penalize this

Remember Google has specific site quality guidelines. Merely linking out to your own sites is not going to give them a penalty, the links will definitely not hold as much weight but you’re not going to be penalized.

Here I link my sites to my own name domain but it could be anything. You could link to any phrase or word like a company name. Tyler Cruz uses the domain Merendi.com to interlink his websites and that domain name has since become the name of his registered company.

The advantage of making the central website a blog

Google loves blogs, visits blogs regularly and gives blogs good rankings. By linking all your sites to a blog which is continually updated all those links become that little bit more powerful. Plus should the blog take off and get a number of links to itself then all your sites benefit.

When launching a new site forget about trying to get a link on gumtree.com or other community website. Just link to it from your blog, update the blog and there you go – Google will discover and index your new site in no time.

The disadvantages of making the central website a blog

The only problem is you give away all your websites, if you’ve found a killer niche then other people will see what it is. I often see in my stats that people are looking at my other websites referred from this blog.

If you have enough websites and you don’t give away which ones are performing really well you should be ok. As long as it’s organic traffic you’re going for, that’s not something a competitor can copy overnight. One of my sites gets ripped off frequently and the copycats rarely get any rankings. So there you go, it works for me and it will work for you.

I couldn’t believe the domain RunningForBeginners.com is that expensive. I just went to my favorite domain registrar looking to buy the domain and I thought being a 3 word domain it’s bound to be available and it is, but as a premium domain. The owner has offered it for sale through the registrar if someone searches for it. Well I can tell you it’s no where near worth that amount.

The reason I wanted to buy it

I rank number 1 for the term “jogging for beginners” for an odd website and this was bringing me 50+ visitors a day. I couldn’t believe it I rank number 1 for a variety of phrases, many 2 words but these 3 words were giving me the most visitors to the whole website. It was this page and as you can see it isn’t optimized for that phrase whatsoever and not particularly monetized apart from a bit of adsense.

So I thought I’ll see if I can buy the domain JoggingForBeginners.com and get it properly monetized kind of like an experiment to see if I can monetize a generic phrase, after all I could see there were enough visitors to it. So I bought the domain and it took about a week or so to add some affiliate pages and uploaded it.

Slowly but surely it rose in the rankings and now ranks number 1 on Google.com. Actually my sites rank 1 and 2. If you think this is unusual there are search results where out of the first 6 results 5 of them are mine. If it’s quality content Google doesn’t care that you own all the websites in a search result (that’s my experience anyway).

So the site is online and it earns me not a lot of money, it gets about 70 visits per day and most of these stick to the non affiliate pages so I added some adsense to them as you can see: JoggingForBeginners.com. I’d say it earns about £30 to £40 per month on average which is not great but hey it was just a week of work and a little experiment.

So I thought I’ll try RunningForBeginners.com

So this got me thinking “running for beginners” is a more popular phrase that gets about 3 times the traffic of “jogging for beginners”. So I can just buy the domain, re-hash the content from JoggingForBeginners.com and maybe earn 3 times the revenue due to 3 times the visitors (here’s hoping).

So I look at buying the domain and it’s available at £850! I couldn’t believe it! RunningForBeginners.com is not going to be a domain where you’re going to run a business from, it’s not going to make you a fortune. Plus the phrase “running for beginners” at Google has a nasty About.com page hogging the number 1 spot. So it’ll take a bit of work to beat it.

I think at most it’s worth about £50 and even then I probably wouldn’t buy it for that amount. The domain owner is probably waiting for a company or government with a fitness incentive and deep pockets to buy the domain and then promote it to their customers or citizens. No private buyer is going to pay that and I think they’ll be waiting a long time to sell it.

I bought RunningForBeginners.net instead

So I went for the .net sod that am I paying all that money. The funny thing is I had an idea for another website after I bought it that I’m going to work on instead. So RunningForBeginners.net is just going to sit in my domain account until I get round to making the website. I just hope this extortion, cybersquatting type thing isn’t a sign of things to come.

I can’t stand them. As an affiliate they are the bane of my life. They offer little value to the web and there are hundreds of them around. Worst of all they often rank just below the merchant. How they got this authority status in the eyes of Google I have no idea. The concept of a unique content penalty seemed to pass the coupon site by, after all the only unique content is just the code itself and that’s often duplicated among coupon code sites.

I even did an open letter to Matt Cutts regarding my feelings about coupon code sites in a previous blog post. But maybe his secretaries or his underlings didn’t see it.

Why I hate them

As an affiliate I’ll do a review on a product like an expensive bit of fitness equipment. The cost is say $2,500 and I’ve convinced the affiliate to buy it and they’ve even clicked on my link. Then when they get to check out there’s an empty field asking for a coupon code. Now when you’re buying something that costs a lot of money and there’s a chance there could be money off you’ll go for it. So my customer searches the web and finds a coupon code and clicks the coupon code site’s link and they get the credit. I’ve done the pre-sell and convinced the customer to buy but I earn nothing.

How long does it take to create a page on a coupon code site? 10 minutes? I’ve done all the research for the review and written 600 words whereas the coupon code site has written 30 to 50 words in 10 minutes and they get the commission.

The main work for a coupon code site is getting it to rank, the content is secondary to link building. Some of them have even tried adding customer reviews to rank for “merchant review”, they’re getting smart these coupon code people.

Merchants don’t help

Having a massive field for a coupon code to be entered at checkout really doesn’t help. One of the most experienced internet marketing consultants Mark Welch who advises merchants about affiliate programs has some fantastic recommendations to merchants regarding coupon codes which include the following:

1 – If possible, don’t prompt for a coupon code at all; or move the prompt “below the fold” and below the checkout button; or suppress the prompt if a code has already been applied to the shopper’s cart (so that the application of an affiliate coupon will suppress the prompt that might otherwise divert credit to another “coupon affiliate”).

2 – Create your own “coupon page” at your own site, so that it will appear first in an organic search for “MerchantName coupon” or “MerchantName promo code.” Note that this is an important strategy even if you offer no coupons (if the page says “there are no currently valid coupon offers” [ideally in the page title], then fewer consumers will click to coupon sites.)

This way affiliates like me who do reviews will get credit and those with coupon codes who have genuinely won the customer gets their piece of the pie. Sadly these recommendations are rarely taken up by merchants, I only know of 2 that do this.

If you can’t beat them join them

Unfortunately this is what I and I think affiliates like me have to do. The good thing is we have many advantages over just coupon code sites. If you’ve done reviews of products you can put the coupons on those pages but even more powerful is to create a page especially for coupons. This has an advantage because your whole site is going to rank high or at least be very focussed on that niche so you’re coupon code pages normally rank higher than pure coupon code sites.

I’ve only just started doing this and already I can see it’s a real winner. Sure you’re still unlikely to topple myvouchercodes or couponmountain but you give them a damn good run for their money. So give it a try and let me know how you get on.

I’ve recently experienced the true power of a naturally given one way link from an authority site. My site had it’s traffic doubled and the income has grown 10 times, absolutely true. But the best thing of all is that the link is no longer near the home page of the authority site but traffic and income are still at the high levels.

My site

I really want to give all the details of all the sites involved but I can’t because it could be copied. Anyway my site used to get about 30 to 50 visitors a day and make £30 to £50 per month. The link went up around 15th of May and since that date it gets 100 visitors per day and makes around £300 to £500 per month. It gets multiple sales per day and this is still happening.

The link is pointing to an internal page and obviously the traffic on that page went up but the whole site received a boost in traffic. This is a really tight niche against stiff competition and my rankings in Google have gone through the roof. The link didn’t have any keyword anchor text it was just http://www.example.com/internal-page.html with the link round that text.

The authority site

Believe it or not it’s a foreign language site. It’s actually Greek and my link is in English and is combined with other links to internal pages to the leaders in the niche. The site is a portal of a Greek company that has several sites all to do with sports and fitness. It has a pagerank of 4 which may not seem much but when you consider it’s a foreign language site and a niche that’s real authority.

The actual link is on a forum post which sounds really lame but this post was linked to from the front page as a really useful post. It’s all do follow and it’s not linked to from the front page any more but my traffic and income are still at the peak levels. I think Google just saw it for the natural link it was surrounded by links to authority sites and so gave my site some of that authority.

Not all links are created equally

I forget where I read that first but it’s so true. I build reciprocal links because they still work despite everyone else thinking they’re not worth it and the traffic increase from them is mild. But a natural link and natural in the eyes of Google holds so much power it’s untrue. What this also confirms is that the power seems to remain while the link is in place even though it’s now far from the home page.

My sites hardly ever get natural links and being affiliate sites it’s not surprising but this example has really spurred me one to try and get more links. Ok natural ones are hard to come by but I should be doing more link building because they really do make a difference. So there you go the power of a natural link can be double your traffic and up to 10 times more income, the only problem is getting them in the first place.

I surf the web like any other affiliate although I do usually stick to the sites I know and love. My Google reader has 92 subscriptions of the blogs I read. I never have to visit them. In fact I only ever surf the web and investigate what’s online when I have to look at my stats or I am researching something.

However I was seeing where I ranked for a certain keyword that I had a visit for as per Google Analytics and I came across some really good blogs. These were blogs where I was glued at my computer screen transfixed at every page I went to. It was like discovering the net for the first time again. It was great engaging content and I’m going to share it here so you can enjoy it too.

1 – Blogger Illustrated

This is a blog by a guy called Allyn Hane a self confessed master of his own domain. He makes around a couple of grand a month from affiliate marketing and he blogs about his experiences and how he’s making money. He lives with his family and children and does a full time job as a sales manager for around 10 hours a day. So on top of working and his family he finds time to do affiliate marketing. That’s quite impressive. As you can see the name of the blog I think is a take on the famous American magazine “Sports Illustrated”. Anyway the guy is a legend and I’ve been transfixed by his videos and blog posts.

Does he have the best affiliate advice? Well he has some great advice about how he does his article marketing connected with squidoo and hub pages. What I most like about his blog and videos is his “can do anything” personality. He should be a motivational speaker, his videos inspire. On top of this he’s a funny guy, he’s very up front, there’s no bull crap with him and he’s always got a beer in his hand in the videos. That’s a man after my own heart, hell there’s even a video of him on a treadmill where he’s giving advice and in the water bottle holder is a bottle of beer! Genius.

2 – The Keyword Academy

Now this site is far more heavy going than Blogger Illustrated but is valuable for different reasons. One is that it contains probably the best make money online article I’ve ever read. This article has so much valuable advice for all affiliate marketers especially those who go for organic rankings that I’m going to do a whole blog post about it.

The blog is kind of a promotion for the keyword academy course which is $1 for the first month and re billed at $29 per month there after. If they put as much effort in the paid content like they do in the free blog then I think it’s great value and I shall be joining really soon. The blog currently has over 10,000 subscribers and gives in depth methods of making money online and how to improve the rankings of your websites. Something we all need to know.

So there you go

There’s 2 blogs that I’ve only just discovered that have great content and I can’t wait to see what they post next. Plus I think they’re a great resource for improving your online business. Blogger Illustrated blog is a great motivational tool for upcoming affiliates and I’ll certainly be taking some of his advice especially about article marketing. So please do visit them, let me know what you think and I hope you find something of value there too.

Being a full time affiliate marketer I spend most of my time writing articles. I reckon I write about 20 to 25,000 words a month. Now all these words have to be read over and any mistakes corrected before they get published on the web.

The moment after writing the article

I’m really happy the article’s written and I’ll probably spell check because it’s done automatically for me and I just approve the correction or not. Then I’ll go and make a cup of tea when I should read it through to see if it reads well aka proof reading. I hate proof reading. I’ll do anything to avoid it and that cup of tea is one of them.

I often need to correct things when I proof read

This shows just how important it is. Sometimes whole sentences get re-written or modified. Words get deleted and sometimes the tone of a phrase is changed. Sometimes words get repeated in sentences and a proof read allows me to spot it. The classic “your” or “you’re” often gets a correction too.

What I do to correct the problem

As soon as the article is written I’ll do a spell check and I’ll force myself to proof read it immediately and I’ve got used to doing that. If I force yourself it becomes easier the next time and then becomes second nature. However the proof read procrastination is like an addiction and it’s a drug that you have to battle constantly if you want to keep it at bay.

So that’s it I’ve finished this article, time for a spell check and I’ll do a word count on a cut and paste script and then I’m going to immediately proof read it. Definitely. I won’t make a cup of tea instead.