Gadooney.com

(Remember, if you’re playing along at home and would like a review of your site, just shoot me an email or comment and it shall be so.)

Best Air Miles Deals is an interesting idea for an affiliate site, and a bit different than most sites I’ve talked about here. Most of the sites I’ve been cranking out are pretty squarely targeted at search engine traffic, and aren’t necessarily designed to build an audience and keep them around. There are some exceptions (such as this site and a few others), but by and large I find potentially profitable niches, build small sites with content driven by keywords for those niches, then move on, with no real effort to make the site sticky.

Best Air Miles Deals, though, is completely different. Jeff has set up the site so that, from day 1, you have to keep returning to his site, if you’re interested in finding the best way to maximize the air miles you accumulate. He’s doing a lot of the research and legwork for potential readers, so they’re locked in to checking back to his site, each and every day, if they want to tap into his knowledge. It’s not only potentially sticky and interactive, but it also leaves interested readers no choice but to return.

It’s also got some nice tie-ins to existing affiliate programs, especially with credit card affiliate programs. Those are some of the most lucrative out there, paying a very high cost-per acquisition (CPA) rate for everyone you refer who signs up for a credit card, and it’s a very natural fit to market those, given the nature of the site. Any niche with high CPA deals also tends to pay pretty well for clicks to Adsense ads, too, so that’s working in your favor as well.

As a whole, the site layout is solid enough. The category structure works well for you and I think opening up posts to comments is smart, especially as the site gets traffic and people start leaving comments, as that could be a draw in and of itself, especially if savvy people leave comments about other great air miles deals, etc. (I might tweak the theme a bit to remove the background colored box for the comments section, as all of those horizontal boxes are a little intimidating, but that’s more in the personal taste realm, and it’s fine as is).

As far as suggestions and possible improvements, don’t be afraid to be an expert (even if you don’t consider yourself one). The current “About” section is honest and accurate, but it isn’t the most compelling of tales. If I’m a random reader who lands on the site, I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the fact that you’ve only been accumulating air miles for 6 months and are halfway to earning a free flight (or already have earned one, the text is a bit unclear).

Should you lie instead, and claim to have earned millions of air miles from the tips and tactics you recommend on the site? Well, I’m not going to tell you to lie, necessarily, but I’m also not not going to tell you to lie, either. Remember, there’s no law that says that the persona writing the content for the site has to be you. Affiliate sites exist to make you money, nothing more, nothing less.

In a case like this, I’d ask myself the following questions, if I were debating whether to adopt a more “experienced” persona for the site. Am I completely misleading users and talking about something I’m far from an expert about? In this case, no. You obviously are good at playing the air miles game, and users still get great tips on maxing out their own air miles. Are you taking advantage of readers somehow by pretending to be more expert? Again, no, you’re just spinning the text in a slightly different way. So, personally speaking, I’d probably adopt a more experienced, wheeling-and-dealing persona for the site, but that’s just me.

The biggest obstacle for a site like this is going to be all of the legwork you have to do, as far as finding good deals and constantly posting content to the site. It’s not the sort of site that you can let sit for weeks at a time, slowly building content for, etc. Because most of the deals are time-sensitive, you have to keep feeding new deals into the hopper, or risk losing any readers that you accumulate over time. So your load is doubled, as far as maintaining the site, since you not only have to constantly find good deals, but also post about them on the site.

Marketing the site and growing traffic will be a bit different, too. You’ll have to take a slightly more active role in growing traffic, as far as taking part in existing forum sites devoted to coupons/deals such as FatWallet.com, and siphon people off to your site via strategic use of signtaure URLs, direct links to your content, etc. While search engine traffic is always good, you really want to attract active users who play the air miles game themselves, and who will comment with the own deals they find, as that’s when the site will really take off.

In that vein, this would be a good site to consider adding an email collection box in the sidebar, as far as a breaking-deal sort of alert that people could sign up for and get emailed about, when you find a really nice deal somewhere. It’s kind of a pain to manage such things but it can be invaluable for sites like this, as it gives you a way to ping people and remind them that hey, there’s that cool website out there about air mile deals that I used to check out but had forgotten about. It’s also a very natural fit, as far as an email service, and would probably get more people signing up as opposed to a generic email collection box on a site about wombats, which would have no real reason to ever need to email people.

All in all, you’re off to a great start. It’s going to be a lot of work to do it up right and maintain it, but the site definitely has legs and is an interesting idea. Interactive community sites like that are harder to get rolling, for all the obvious reasons, but once they acquire momentum they tend to pick up steam quickly, as users end up shouldering much of the workload themselves.

Peter has been playing along at home and recently requested a review of the site he and his wife are working on, My Crafty Corner.

Hopefully he doesn’t mind it being done in a public fashion such as this, but I think that format is especially helpful, as it provides links and eyeballs to the site being discussed as well as possible tips and fodder for people working on their own site. If anyone else lurking out there would like a similar review, holler at me and it shall be so.

From the highest of aerial views, the site is a great start, especially starting from scratch and with no previous knowledge of working with WordPress, affiliate sites, HTML, etc. You picked a great topic, as it’s one that you and your wife obviously know a lot about, but also one that has lots of Adsense advertisers. So not only is it easy to create lots of juicy content, but there’s an audience and market for a lot of the keywords you’re working with, due to the theme and nature of the site.

You’re also doing a great job of incorporating images into your content. Not only do they illustrate the projects involved, but they also do a great job of personalizing the site, as they’re largely pictures of your family, so it’s much easier for users to connect and empathize with your content.

It’s kind of a subtle effect but it’s much easier to build trust and authority with your audience if they feel like they know you on a more personal level than the average surfer/webmaster relationship.

Some general areas you might monkey with, in no particular order:

1) I wonder if tackling the broad “crafts” market is the best choice, or if you’d get more traction if you optimized the site for a smaller, more focused slice of the crafts pie.

2) Since it’s largely about scrapbooking (and the ads currently displaying via Adsense are almost all scrapbooking related), I’d be tempted to run with that, possibly titling the site “My Scrapbooking Corner” or “My Crafty Corner: Adventures in Scrapbooking and More.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t touch on other non-scrapbooking crafts content, it would just mean that the site title (which gets a lot of emphasis when search engines rank pages) would focus on scrapbooking.

3) I struggle with this constantly myself, but you might consider breaking up the content in the posts a bit with paragraph breaks after every 2-3 lines. It’s much easier to read Web content when there are liberal breaks used, and it gives the illusion that your content is longer and meatier.

4) I’d definitely change the background color of the existing Adsense ads that you’re running, so that they blend into the color of the theme. With the white background that they currently use they pretty much scream “Ignore Me, I Am an Advertisement!”.

5) It’s kind of a painful reality of the affiliate world, but you’ll get the best traction from Adsense if you blend the ads tightly with your content, and put them in places where they’re highly visible. Here’s an example of a layout that’s worked well for me on assorted sites, as far as integrating Adsense ads.

I’ll admit, that’s a little intrusive. But it works, as far as getting clicks and making money in Adsense. The 468×15 link unit ads above the post title look more like navigational links than ads, so they get lots of clicks. The 200×200 Adsense unit in the text is pretty intrusive, but again, people tend to click on links like that more often if they’re actually embedded in the text. Then the final Adsense ad unit at the bottom hits up anyone that’s made it that far with one last sales pitch.

Whether you go that far or not is ultimately up to you. Some people don’t like to dirty their sites up that much with ads, and that’s totally understandable. In general, though, the more tightly you integrate the ads into the content, the more money you’ll make.

6) You might check CommissionJunction (CJ) to see if they have existing affiliate programs for some of the products mentioned in posts. I think Joann’s has a program through CJ, and there might be other arts/crafts retailers. If you can link to actual products via their affiliate program, you’ll get a lot of potential bang for your buck, and won’t have to rely solely on Adsense to potentially make money.

7) The titles of posts could do more work for you, as far as being more descriptive of the project involved. Search engines put a lot of weight on the titles of pages and posts, so you want these to be as descriptive as possible and to hit up common search terms that people interested in scrapbooking might search on.

Overall, though, it’s a great start, especially for your first shot at it. Keep on cranking out juicy content and tweak and fiddle with a few things, as you’re definitely on the right track.

 

Gots questions? Ask ‘em.

Falstaff has been playing along at home and asked that I take a quick look at the sites he’s working on. Can do. If you’d like reviews of your own sites, holler at me and it shall be so.

Here are the sites we’re looking at today: Full Shill Poker, Boogie Turtle, Lighting for Worship, and Charlotte Theatre News and Gossip.

As a whole, that’s a damn good start, especially since you were starting from scratch just a few weeks ago, with no real knowledge of Wordpress, hosting stuff, etc. It’s easy to be overwhelmed at first by all the things you don’t know, but you’re plowing ahead and getting content up. I also like that you have many different types of sites you’re working on, so it’s easy to mix in different types of content, work over here a bit, then over there, and not get burned out writing about the same stuff on the same site.

Full Shill Poker and Boogie Turtle are the most developed, as far as content and theme. It’s pretty easy to tell that both are subjects you’re interested in and knowledgable about, and the content you’re posting on each is right on track, as far as the stuff that’ll get you search engine traffic. Each fits into a niche that you know about and can easily create content for. Each also has existing affiliate programs that meshes well with your content (poker and casino affiliate programs and online retailers that sell CDs), so you don’t have to rely solely on Adsense as far as monetizing the sites.

While I usually don’t worry about the layout of the site all that much in the beginning, I do have to say that I’m not a fan of the dark backgrounds, especially on Full Shill Poker, as the combination of the black background and white text in that font makes my eyes scream for mercy after reading it for a bit. This falls into the personal taste category somewhat, but in general it’s recommended that you stay away from black/dark grey background sites, as a gawdawful number of expensive studies have shown that sites with plain white backgrounds, black text, and blue links/colors perform the best.

My approach to this in my own sites is to generally look at the Yahoos, Googles, and Amazons of the world and do what they do, as it’s obviously working. Boring, yes, but it’s hard to argue with their success.

A by-product of the dark backgrounds you’re using is that the ads (which generally have a white background) are very obviously ads, jumping out from the screen and blaring at the surfer. This is a little counter-intuitive, but that’s actually bad. Your goal is to be sneaky and to blend and incorporate the ads as much as possible into your site design. If it screams out “I’M AN ADVERTISEMENT!”, surfers have become conditioned to almost subconsciously ignore it; if it appears to be part of the navigation of the site, more people tend to read it and/or click on it.

Don’t be afraid to specialize your ads, especially on Full Shill Poker. I like the riff on “Full Tilt Poker” and wonder if you could simply shill for them, as far as the ads and baners you display. Having done the poker/casino affiliate thing, in general there’s not a huge difference from what you’ll make from program to program, barring special circumstances. If all of your advertising is focused on Full Tilt (and tghtly integrated into the site design) it gives it a more weighty, polished look, instead of banners for a bunch of different sites jumping out at you.

As far as Boogie Turtle, I’d work in some direct product links in each review, especially if they’re sold on Amazon, iTunes, or at some other online retailer. You might have to do some poking around to see what music CD programs are out there, which pay the best, etc. The reviews are great but you’ll make more money if you have linked album covers or tracks. You could also list the tracks on each album and have them hyperlinked, so that surfers click on them looking for a sample but end up getting transported to the page at the retailer, where sample tracks actually are and where they can buy it, and you can make some cash.

For affiliate sites that are tied into products, it’s always best to include as many direct product links to specific products as you can. Links and banners to Amazon are fine but your real money is in providing direct links to buy the specific product you’re talking about, as that’s what people are after.

Lighting for Worship and Charlotte Theatre News and Gossip are still in the infant stages, so not much to say there.  Forum sites like the theatre one are hard to monetize sometimes but they’re usually very little work for you, as forum members supply most of the content. They’re also a no-brainer if it’s something you’re already involved in, especially if it provides a useful service that is otherwise lacking. I like the idea behind Lighting for Worship, as I can’t imagine there are too many sites with content about that particular niche, and you can potentially not only get Jebus-related traffic (of which there’s a bunch) but also traffic from people looking for more info on the equipment itself.

All in all, you’re off to a great start, especially considering that you’re starting from square one. Keep cranking out content. The main things I’d consider tweaking are the dark backgrounds on the first two sites and to fiddle with the ads more, trying to incorporate them as seamlessly as possible into the site.