Gadooney.com

Celebrating Your One Month Anniversary

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.)

Optimizing Your Permalinks Structure in WordPress

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.