Gadooney.com

Sorry about the sparse updates of late, but real life has been an inistent bugger of late, what with putting in an offer on an investment property, taking our silly, clumsy pet rat to the vet, and all the other boring details that manage to quickly fill up one’s day, leaving little time for blog ramblings.

Soon, though, we shall get back to the regularly scheduled ramblings.

It’s easy to forget about sitemaps, especially these days as XML sitemaps become standard, since they often do their work behind the scenes, often not even visible to any normal user on your site. Depending on what tool you use to create them, it’s easy for even you to forget about them, as they’re often created and updated automatically.

Sitemaps are essentially a table of contents of your site, listing every single page on your site. Back in ancient times, sitemaps were displayed just like any other .html or .php page, and were often shown hierarchically, looking a bit like a family tree, with each page accounted for and hyperlinked to the corresponding page where it was at.

Sitemaps served double duty, acting as a potential navigation tool for users on your site (I’ll sometimes still use sitemaps for that purpose today, if I’m not finding a specific page that I believe might exist, especially when hunting for affiliate programs on merchant sites, as they don’t often make those links prominent to the general public) as well as an aid to search engine spiders that are indexiing your site.

Over time, sitemaps trended towards the latter, as webmasters realized the value of sitemaps in an SEO sense, since they provide an extra layer of protection to ensure that spiders find all of your pages and that no orphan pages get left out. Search engines themselves saw the value in sitemaps as well, since it made their jobs easier, so Google has always been a strong proponent of using sitemaps on your site.

As sitemaps shifted towards more of a back-end tool, their format began to change, too, with Google pushing webmasters to use an XML format that Google developed in 2005. Yahoo and MSN agreed to support the XML-Sitemaps format in late 2006, so all three of the major search engines are on board, and send their spiders to periodically search the same pool of sitemaps submitted to them.

What does all this mean to you, as an affiliate? You need to get on the sitemap trolley if you aren’t, and create a sitemap in the standard XML format and submit it to Google.

Depending on your setup, this can be pretty simple. Since I’m always singing the praises of WordPress, let’s start there, as, no surprise, there are existing tools that make it a piece of cake to create and submit XML sitemaps iff you’re using WordPress.

First you need to grab a handy Sitemap Generator for WordPress free plugin. Installation is a snap, just upload the sitemap.php file to your Plugins folder and follow the instructions. Activate the plugin, have it generate the first sitemap for you, and you’re done, as it automatically pings Google and lets it know that your sitemap is ready to be spidered. If you don’t trust the wonder of automations, you can also submit the URL for the XML sitemap to Google at this page.

If you submit it manually, you now have to jump through a few hoops, as Google is now making you wade through some extra steps. The first time you hit that page, it’ll ask you to log-in to take advantage of it’s publisher tools, yada yada yada. I’d recommend doing so, even if you don’t have an existing Google account, as there are some useful tools there, which I’ll touch on later. So do all that, log in, and then click on the link above again. That’ll take you (finally) to the specific page to manually submit your XML sitemap.

One very cool thing about the plugin above is that you can set it on auto-pilot, so that it automaatically rebuilds your sitemap to include new pages you’ve created and pings Google, letting it know that your sitemap is ready to be crawled. (And no, I’m not being Google-centric, as Google shares its database of XML sitemaps with Yahoo and MSN, so submitting your sitemap to Google is just like submitting it to all three places.) Another cool feature of the plugin is that you can prioritize certain types of content in your sitemap, rank the types of things that are most important to you to get spidered, etc.

If you’re not using WordPress, don’t despair, as it’s pretty simply to create an XML sitemap by hand, upload it to your server, and submit it to Google. XML-Sitemaps.com offers a free generator (which works for sites with up to 500 pages), where you simply input your URL and follow the instructions. After you’ve created your XML sitemap and uploaded it to your server, use the link above to manually submit it to Google Sitemaps for crawling.

And that’s pretty much it. One thing to remember is that you shouldn’t rely on sitemaps to save you from sloppy site design, and should always use good link structure with multiple ways for users and spiders to find the content on your site. Sitemaps should simply be seen as an insurance policy to make sure that all of your good, juicy content gets indexed, not a solution in and of themselves.

Weekly recap is going to be on the brief side this week, as this weekend promises to be on the hectic side.

I’m still catching up on some lingering work from shifting hosts, as far as getting the last few sites moved over, so that I can completely shut down the old hosting account. WordPress isn’t helping matters, either, as they’ve released three upgrades in the last few weeks, so I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit there, upgrading sites here and there to the new version, only to find out a few days later there’s a newer new version, etc.

On the content side, I rolled out a new site at Vroomchatter.com, which soaked up much of my time as far as content creation. I’m not a die hard NASCAR fan, but we watch the race most weekends, and actually went to a race in Phoenix on our honeymoon, so it’s something I’m interested in, which makes content creation much easier. I also wanted to try an affiliate site that was a bit different than my other stuff, as far as taking a popular niche like NASCAR (which has lots of fan sies, blogs, and news sites) and creating a site that would aggregate a lot of the content, with a little wit and insight thrown in for good measure.
I’m probably going to chill a bit on adding new sites for awhile, as I’ve got a good mix of sites going at the moment, and a month or two to really crank on the content and site optimization before Google and other search engines fully index the sites. We’ll see if I can stick to that promise, though, as I’m sort of a sucker for suddenly deciding that OH MY LORD I MUST HAVE A SITE ABOUT DIABETIC WOMBATS and registering the domain, slapping up a site quickly with WordPress, and creating a bunch of content for it.

Traffic is inching up here, week by week, which is encouraging, especially since I’ve done very little to try to generate traffic, other than simply post content.

(Sorry for the relative lack of posts this week but things have been pretty crazy hectic.)

I’ve talked a good bit about imagining your audience while building sites, as far as taking advantage of all the myriad ways that you can crack the affiliate marketing nut and make some money. The sky really is the limit, as far as the actual form and tone your site takes.

If you strip away all of the confusing crap, affiiliate marketing is simple: people have questions and you answer them. There’s a gap in their knowledge and you fill it. If you can do that consistently, you’ll make a lot of money.

One of the biggest obstacles to people starting out in the affiliate world is the proclivity to fiddle. They want their site to look perfect and to have all sorts of cool bells and whistles, so they constantly adjust the layout, the font, the colors, add forums, chat rooms, you name it. They fiddle and fiddle and fiddle. Then they fiddle some more.

I’m not going to ban you from fiddling, but I think much of that springs from a source that’s not readily apparent, and a misconception that many people have about the nature of affiliate marketing. Quiz time.

What’s better, an audience of one or an audience of millions, as far as traffic to your site?

The obvious answer is an audience of millions, and while I’m not going to try to argue that it’s the wrong answer, I will argue that it’s actually not as clear-cut an answer as it might seem at first glance.
Many people start out with the preconceived notion that successful affiliates have sites with huge traffic, and that the way to make money is to build a sticky, awesome site that will attract visitors like fat kids on cake. And sure, affiliates with sticky, awesome sites with heavy traffic do often make tons of money, but it’s probably the exception to the rule, as far as what’s the bread-and-butter for most affiliates.

You don’t need to build a community of returning, happy surfers to your site to make money as an affiliate. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your success or failure as an affiliate depends on whether you build attractive sites that are useful to surfers, and wow them to the point that they’ll bookmark it and return frequently, because of its awesomeness and utility.

If you have a site like that (or can quickly build one), congratulations, you kick much ass. Just keep in mind that there are many, many ways to make money from a site, and that the site you build should depend on your personal skills, and not so much on achieving the ideal site mentioned above.

Some affiliates specialize in banging out five or six page sites, focused on incredibly narrow micro-niches and built around Adsense or other PPC ads, which might never get a return visitor in the entire lifespan of the site. Yet these can be very profitable sites, if you choose your micro-niche well, and you can make many grandusands of American dollars if you build a ton of similar sites.

Their audience is effectively one, as the goal is to pick up clicks on the ads surfer by surfer, as they find pages of the site in search engines, click through to the site, and hopefully click on an ad, never to return. They not only don’t build up a community of users over time, but sites like that are in essence anti-community, from their very conception. Hit it and quit it, from the perspective of both the affiliate who designs the site and the surfer who finds it through search engines.

Does that mean you should avoid building affiliate sites that might draw a crowd? Of course not. Both approaches work, and all I’m really after is trying to deconstruct the idea that many people bring to the process of building sites, which is that in order to succeed, they must concoct and build a site that people will love, bookmark, link to, and recommend to all their friends.

Sites like that are great but they’re hard to build, for all the obvious reasons. One of the reasons that I recommend you try all sorts of things when starting out (as opposed to focusing all your efforts on one project) is that it lets you do exactly that, try different things. Maybe you find out that you have no desire to bang out mini-sites that add little value to the Web as a whole, and that what really gets you going is building a community site about quilting, where people can get together and talk hoops, share patterns, chat in a chat room, etc. Maybe you find out that you’re better at building blog-style sites on topics near and dear to your heart. Maybe you enjoy banging out 182 five page sites a week, taking the volume approach.

All of those can be profitable and you never know what works for you until you try. Too many people approach the affiliate world in too rigid a fashion, on both sides of the equations. People looking to make money as an affiliate often want a checklist of things to do to make cash, to simply be told how to mint money, in ABC fashion. Too many affiliates who dispense advice on the Internet tubes get locked into the mindset of what has personally worked for them, without recognizing the fact that everyone is different and brings different skills to the table.

Try it and see what happens.

Let’s start off with a quick compare and contrast, looking quickly at two sites, then hopping back here. Just scroll down and view each site as a whole, without getting too bogged in details or clicking links or anything like that.

Patio to Pool

Cisco certification

If you had to make a quick, snap judgment, it’d probably be that the Patio to Pool site looks much better, slicker, and more engaging, while the Cisco site looks kind of crappy and cluttered. And you’d be exactly right, on all accounts, but one of the key reasons is a bit subtle.

I don’t have the design vocabulary to explain it well, but the use of images in the posts on the Patio to Pool site really adds a lot of oomph. Not only does it illuminate and illustrate the topic of each post, but it serves as a visual break, giving your eyes a rest from what would otherwise be a sea of text.

Not so much with the Cisco site, as it’s a bit difficult to focus on things, and the text seems overwhelming. As far as actual word count, the posts on both sites are generally in the same neighborhood, as far as length. But something as simple as inserting images really gives the Patio to Pool site some extra pop, making it look much more inviting and professional looking.

Another subtle bonus from including images in your content is that you can also put them to use for you as far as SEO goes, by using descriptive, targeted alt tags. If you mouse over the images on the Patio to Pool site, you’ll see a title like “Samsonite patio furniture” pop up. Search engines do, to greater and lesser extents, take image alt text into account when ranking pages, so adding images (with targeted alt tags that reinforce the title of the post and the keywords you’re pursuing) can actually give you a boost in search engine results. Usually not a huge one, but every little bit helps.

If you’re building affiliate sites for products, including images is pretty much a no-brainer, if they’re readily available. People love to see the actual products, so including product images will let you kill all sorts of birds with one stones.

Notice, though, the caveat that I added, which was “if they’re readily available”. That’s the only downside to including images, which is that they not only take some work to include in your content, but they’re not always easily found.

Some affiliate programs give you the tools to quickly find and locate images in their catalog (and link them to specific products), while others don’t, forcing you to do the legwork of finding the images that correspond to specific products, etc. Some programs host the images for you while others require you to serve them yourself. It varies pretty widely from program to program, with no real standard.

Like anything, you have to weigh how much time you’re spending in including images, as far as how valuable it might be to your site. In some areas, it’s simply not necessary, and you’ll do fine with very few images, while in others it’s more necessary.

If the affiliate program you’re working with makes it very easy to add images, it’s almost always good to do so, as they really do make your site more atractive. If it’s difficult to add images and doing so adds many hours to creating a site, well, that’s when you have to make a decision, as to whether you’ll likely get more ROI out of having images on pages or on spending your time creating more content.

It’s been about a month since I officially sent this site out over the Internet tubes for public consumption, so I thought it’d be a good time to check in. Not so much from a nuts-and-bolts analysis of traffic or income, but in a broader, more general sense.

Most people who give affiliate marketing a whirl don’t last. They build some sites, put up some links, don’t make any money, and give up after a month or two. They start strong, posting lots of content, but it dwindles over time, as there’s no indication that it’s working, no traffic to their sites, and no real return on investment as far as they time they’re putting into it.

That’s all very, very natural. In many different ways. natural to be discouraged, natural to want to quit, and natural to see no results at all for quite awhile.

I go through that myself, each and every time I launch new sites. I’m going through it right now, to various degrees. It’s depressing to keep pouring work into sites that not only have no guarantee of ever making you money, but which take months to get fully indexed in search engines. Life is short. It’s hard to keep grinding away with uncertainty kicking you in the crotch when you could be doing any number of more enjoyable things.

Do I persist because I enjoy getting kicked in the crotch? Well, no. Not at all. I persist because I know this stuff works and because I can point to any number of tangible things that I own because of affiliate marketing (a second house, a savings account, a SEP IRA).

If you can make it a month and are still plugging away, pat yourself on the back. Seriously. That’s a pretty big accomplishment, in and of itself. Most people wash out well before that point. If you’re the drinking type, tip back a few cold ones.

(Then, you know, gird thyself for a few more frustrating months until you start to see appreciable results from all your hard work.)

This one is just for the WordPress crowd, and takes all of two seconds to implement, but one thing to be aware of with WordPress is that a few of its out-of-the-box features need tweaking, if you’re using it for affiliate purposes (or if you’re simply looking to get as much search engine traffic as possible).

The most important one, which I’ve simply gotten into the habit of changing every single time I launch a new site using WordPress, is the permalinks setting. Permalinks are basically the permanent URLS for your pages that WordPress automatically generates, whenever you create a new post or page. The default setting for these look like this:

http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192

That works fine as a URL link, as far as functionality goes, but it doesn’t help us from a SEO perspective. If you can, you should always try to incorporate the keywords you’d like to rank well for in search results into the actual URL. If you’re writing good content and picking good titles, the easiest way to do that is to simply use the title of the content in your URL. So if I were writing a page about “Blue widgets”, and it was titled “Blue widgets”, I’d prefer that the URL for that page look something like this:

http://www.bluewidgets.com/bluewidgets

instead of

http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192

Happily, there’s an incredibly simply solution, if you’re using WordPress. Just login and click on “Options” in the dashboard. In the sub-tabs you’ll see tabs for “General”, “Writing”, “Discussion”, etc. Click on the “Permalinks” tab there.

Once you’re on the Permalink tabs, you’ll see some choices there, with radio buttons. “Default” should already be selected. Click on the option below it, which is “Date and name based”. Hit the “Update Permalink Structure” button in the bottom right and voila, you’re done. All of those links that were previously not helping you in the eyes of search engines (the http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192 ones) have magically been converted into links with your juicy titles incorporated into the URL (now looking like http://www.bluewidgets.com/bluewidgets).

There’s pretty much no reason to ever use the ugly default permalinks settings, so this is one of those things that I have trained myself to always change, right after getting WordPress set up on a new site.

Pretty hectic and crazy week, despite the fact that I got two extra days off from work, due to ice and sleet and what-not in central Texas, of all places.

Much of that was due to switching over to a dedicated server at HostGator, and all the work involved in that. There’s not much joy in switching hosts, especially if you have a lot of databases to move over, but I didn’t feel like I had much choice, as my old host couldn’t come up with a solution to the fact that performance across all my sites of late would inexplicably (according to them) bog down at times. Umm, okay. Bye.

Weekly recap is going to be pretty high level, as I need to get my butt in gear and crank out some content myself, having spent much of the week on behind the scenes sort of things. I’m still picking away at Cisco Certifications, but that project goes very slowly. Let that be an object lesson to you, as far as how it’s much harder to write content for a topic that you have little interest in.

It’ll get there, and I’m not really sweating it’s glacial, slumbering pace of getting done, but a good contrast is the Patio to Pool site I launched this week.  Less than a week into that one and I’ve already got tons of pages up, and banging out new pages with relative ease. Don’t get me wrong, I have no great love for pools and/or patios, but it doesn’t put me into an immediate coma, and there are different things to write about to jazz the content creation process up slightly.

I’m still re-vamping some older sites, including Oddsnark, Pig Iron Malt, and Science Fiction Robots. These are hard as they get lots of traffic but they’re also broad and sprawling, so it’s hard to wring much money out of the traffic. The narrower the focus of the site, the easier it is to monetize the traffic it gets, as nearly everyone that comes through the virtual door is a decent, pre-qualified lead. Not so much with broader sites that are about “sports” and “weird” and “technology”, as it’s hard to serve up ads or links that surfers are inclined to respond to and click on.

The plan for the next few weeks is to really grind on the content front, as I’ve got probably half a dozen ideas for new sites lined up, and now that the hosting is sorted out the goal is to just put my head down and get as much stuff out there as possible.

One thing I forget to address when recommending WordPress as a content management system for creating and managing your affiliate sites was the idea that it’s solely a blogging tool, and that anything created with WordPress is therefore a blog, and not a proper website.

At the heart of this, I think, is the fact that most WordPress themes, out of the box, are set up for use as a blog, with comments enabled, with an “About” section for info on the author/blogger. They look like a blog when you turn them on. Which makes much sense, as that’s what WordPress was originally designed for.

It’s also a bit confusing as many affiliate sites are, in fact, blogs, as affiliates have had a lot of success with that model, since users connect personally with blog authors and it’s generally easier to encourage them to click through links, especially if they’re directly related to the content and theme of the blog.

When I recommend using WordPress to manage your affiliate sites, I’m not encouraging you to use the blog format for all of your affiliate sites. That’s a format that has proven successful, and it’s a good place to start, but it’s very easy to use WordPress to create affiliate sites that aren’t blogs at all, too.

Confused yet? It’s actually really simple, if you look at some examples.

This site itself is a bit of a hybrid. I have comments turned on and I encourage interaction from users (both key elements in blogs), but most of the posts are instructional content. If I created a traditional site that didn’t use WordPress it would actually be structured exactly the same, as I’d have the same categories that  would contain links to the same existing articles I’m creating. I use WordPress because it makes my life much easier, as I don’t have to update a page of links, make sure all the changes happen throughout the site, etc.

If I wanted, though, I could easily turn off the comments and remove any hint of them, like I did at the Cisco certifications site I’m (still) working on. I plan on taking that a step further there and removing both the Calendar and Archives in the sidebar to the left and tweaking the theme so that it doesn’t publish the date of each post in the top right of each page. That is all very easy to do, as far as editing a few lines in the PHP code of the themes, and the end result is that many of the elements that make it seem like a blog (comments, dates on posts, and an archive or calendar that shows posts by month) are suddenly gone.

To an average surfer landing on that site, they would have no vlue that it had started its life as a “blog”, and it’d look like any other website. I’d still be able to use WordPress as a convenient, Web-based tool to publish and manage my website, without being forced into the box of all my sites being “blogs”.

You can also mix and match elements, such as a new site I’m working on, Patio to Pool. I’m keeping lots of the normal blog elements, but I turned off comments. The goal with that site is to build pages for all sorts of juicy patio and pool search terms that pay well in Adsense, but to keep the user interaction limited. I want them to be able to associate the site with a face and a voice (Pool and Patio Gal), but I don’t want to expend time answering comments, deleting comment spam, responding to emails, etc.  I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too, as far as presenting a friendly, casual format (a blog about patio and pool stuff) that people can connect to, but without the element that creates a ton of work for me, the comments.

Those are just a few examples of how you can modify the output of WordPress to work for you in different ways, depending on what form you want your affiliate site to take. The key message to take away is that WordPress is actually pretty flexible, so no, you’re not locked into creating a blog when you use it for affiliate purposes, as you can actually tweak and modify it in all sorts of ways to suit your purposes.