Is there any money left?

RSS feeds can be a great way of promoting your website, providing a list of recent headlines, with or without ‘teasers’ which are short sections of text from the beginnings of the stories.

As a WordPress blog, this blog automatically produces an RSS feed (click here to see it), and now that it is three months old, with quite a few posts, there is enough of it there to be used for promoting my website.

The first place I’ve used to promote my RSS feed is obviously my own website, where I’ve produced a page on RSS feeds as extra features for web design packages. I’ve also collected a set of web related news feeds to keep up to date with.

Next I found a directory on a site that hosts a very useful feature for displaying RSS feeds using Javascript, so I’m submitting the feed URL there (after some puzzling it over I chose the ‘Internet Marketing’ category). They require a reciprocal link for this, so here it is: RSS 2 JAVA - Directory.

When I find more of these, I’ll also post the URLs here.

In which Amazon UK Associates have finally paid me - Hooray!

Back in November I applied to be an Amazon Associate, and was lucky enough to make about £20 from the Christmas shopping season.

Later in January I received an earnings report from them, and when I logged into my Amazon Associates account it said they had paid me 2 weeks earlier, but nothing had arrived in my bank account.

I emailed customer support and we went back and forth 3 times with them asking me to check my account again each time in case the payment had turned up. In the meantime, I had figured out what must have happened.

My bank account, which is at one of the biggest banks in the UK, has a seven digit number. Many e-commerce websites apparently assume an eight digit number. In some cases, eg TradeDoubler, the company that owns the website obviously knows about this and either provides instructions or deals with the shorter account number in its own way, but in either case it works. In other cases, such as when signing up for PayPal UK, the data entry form includes data validation that does not allow a ‘non-standard’ account number to get through. The first time this happened, I emailed my bank’s technical support and got a helpful reply telling me to add an extra zero at the beginning of the number, and this has also worked. But the Amazon Associates UK application form just took my number without saying anything, and then 3 months later when it was time to pay me it didn’t work.

So I suggested to customer services that this could have been what happened, and I re-entered my bank account number with an extra zero at the start, and my query was eventually passed to the finance department.

A few weeks later I logged into my Amazon Associates account again and saw they had posted messages telling people about problems with bank account numbers, and that they should update their details if there had been payment problems they would email if a repeat attempt at payment didn’t go through. But I still hadn’t received my payment. So I updated my details again in case that would trigger off some new automated process that they had set up to deal with this sort of thing, and the message went away.

And then it took ages for my bank statement to arrive. Nothing had changed in my Amazon payment record, but when I eventually got my statement I found the payment had gone through on 4th April.

I was massively relieved, because I’ve heard of other big companies that just have a policy of not paying people.

I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes at Amazon UK - their application form obviously had a serious data validation error, and I never heard anything from their finance department, but to be fair their initial customer services people were polite and helpful, they kept their associates informed as a group, and they did get there in the end with the payment. I’d say my faith has been restored - perhaps I’ll go for the aStore after all!

What a coincidence - just as I received the ‘Nigerian Scam’ again I also received this useful and interesting article from the UK Motley Fool: ‘Steer Clear of these Scams’. I was also sent the address for a scam baiting site called ‘419 eater’ - very entertaining. This website is also apparently high profile enough that someone has registered a typo domain name, ‘491 eater’, which appears to be a thin affiliate site (ie lots of paid links and no content of its own, one of those apparent shops in which every link runs a search).

I got another ‘Nigerian Scam’ today - slightly different scenario but the same basic format (see earlier example). This one wanted lots of personal details, perhaps to sell on. The email subject was ‘Assistance’:

Hello,
It gives me a great deal of pleasure to write you this mail and
even when it might come to you as a surprise, I hope you find it of interest. Let me first introduce myself. My name is David Timms. I am an Executive Auditor with a Bank here in Europe, I would like to use this means to ask your assistance in moving some fund over to your country. I have in the course of my duties come in contact with a good amount of Fund that have been inactive for some years now and careful investigation proved the original depositor of the fund died five years ago and all attempt to reach the suppose beneficiary of the deposit were fruitless and before it is forfeited to the state I decided to move it.
It is of interest to inform you also that I have already moved these funds out of the Establishment and now in safe keeping with a Finance and security house, I will like to move it outside now and this is were I need your assistance.
After legal consultation, I have established modalities for a secured way for a perfect transaction., but be most assured that for your assistance and partnership you will get a good percentage of the fund, it is important to let you know that fifty percent of the rest will be invested over there under your management for a negotiable period of time and we will open a fruitful dialog very soon to that effect. I look forward to our working closely in practically seeing this transaction come to a perfect end. For effective communication, please kindly include in your reply, your complete Names, Address, Occupation, Age and most especially your contact number and I will contact you as soon as I get your reply. I look forward to hearing from you and my gratitude for your Patience
Respectfully yours,
David Timms

Strangely, this one doesn’t even mention how many millions I could get - perhaps they think I will be curious enough to ask them!

A review of 3 months of posting on Hedir

Hedir is a busy website based around a peer reviewed directory, with a community of developers, moderators and reviewers and a much larger group who submit websites for approval in their directory. The idea is that people who submit websites should also review others, but not many of them seem to catch on to this, although it’s a great way of finding out what works and what doesn’t work on other people’s websites. The Hedir website also offers forums, and blogs for its members.

Every page on Hedir shows a couple of units of adverts from Google adsense, and they operate a revenue sharing scheme which I described in my earlier post ‘Adventures with Google Adsense, part 2′. It seems on the surface of it like a good idea and very cleverly done. However, as I discussed, after a month of fairly intensive posting, I had not made any money from it. As I’d been away for 10 days in the middle, I thought for a proper trial I’d give it another month of posting to review pages and forums. By the end of this I had posted about 300 times in total, and I think that gives it a very good chance of working if it’s going to.

The Alexa traffic rank of the site seems good, at around 32,000, but there are currently about 180 pages of sites listed in the review queue. I thought perhaps this meant that each page was hardly ever viewed. If they could bring in some way of requiring everyone who submits a site to do a certain number of reviews, that would bring the size of the queue down and get each page viewed more frequently, but it wouldn’t necessarily get more views for each member’s adverts.

Another reason for the tail off in Hedir adsense views when I was away is of course that once another review has been added to each page (which is presumably the reason for most of the page views), those ads won’t show up for my adsense id any more, meaning that those pages have been removed from the number still available for earning me adsense commissions.

Given the way that people use Hedir review pages, I think there is not likely to be much commission from revenue sharing ads, at least certainly not on the review pages - I can assume this was a typical couple of months. Forums may be viewed more often, being publicly available and linked from the front page, but forum ads are only linked to the last poster 20% of the time. They also offer blogs with adsense revenue sharing, an opportunity which I haven’t tried yet.

However, I did discover another benefit to posting on Hedir: people will sometimes follow the links in your posting’s signature. So I now have about 300 signatures posted on various Hedir pages, which are all currently linking to 3 of my customers’ websites, and I’ve been seeing more traffic coming to the websites from them.

Some members also think it may have an effect on the linked sites’ Google page rank, as the links have been known to show up in their Google Webmaster Tools accounts, but I don’t know how you could check whether there is specifically a page rank effect.

In which I operate a Web Design Template Store

After my experiments with hosting affiliate banners and text ads, I decided to try out another affiliate money making technique: the ‘turnkey’ online shop. I considered an Amazon ‘aStore’ for books on website planning, setup and marketing, but with my Amazon (non) payment issues still dragging on (see post number 3 from February 19th!), I thought I’d leave that one for a while and try a different company instead.

I went back to an earlier problem of customising a set of free templates from my web hosting service, while wondering what else might be a useful product I could sell.

The templates are an economy option I’m offering for web design packages, in the theory that saving time on design will cut down costs and get the websites finished more quickly. I was building template sites with the free templates and site builder program, and finding they weren’t the most polished looking and it took a long time to make the code validate.

On a Google-break from the free templates, I found some much nicer ones on sale from Template Monster, who also had an affiliate programme. I could have recommended their website with text ads and banners or sold the templates separately, but their affiliate programme could also set up a turnkey shop selling the same templates for the same prices from my own website. I liked the sound of the turnkey option and thought it might be worth a try - and also something new to test out for my blog and include as an e-commerce customisation service.

All I had to do was register with them, giving my email and website details, and validating them by following a link from an email they sent me. As a non-US affiliate, the most convenient payment option was via Moneybookers electronic payment, so I checked out their service and signed up with them too.

Back on the Template Monster website, I went for the ‘Ready made affiliate shops’ option and chose the template that looked closest to the general colour scheme of my website. I entered the name of the shop, previewed it, pressed the button for their code to generate it and downloaded it in a zip file.

Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshot of my web design template shop

Then I had to decide what to do with it!

The first decision I made was to host it as part of my web hosting site (as yet very unfinished) rather than my web design site, as it would be more complementary and less in conflict with the custom web design side of the business.

The next decision was which parts of the default content I wanted to keep. Some of the template types require software that I don’t own, and so I wouldn’t be able to work on them if people bought them and came back for customisation. But as I thought people might be more likely to choose a template and move on, I decided to offer the full range, and specify which types would be workable when referring customers for economy web design packages. Plus, I’m not usually a fan of Flash, but some of the templates were really nice. I wondered what the code in the templates would be like, but decided in any case it would be easier to spend time fixing up non-standard code than getting the graphic design issues right.

However, I did want to remove some of the more obvious affiliate links, as well as links to other affiliated web designers that weren’t paying commission - after all it’s no good giving free advertising to your outright competition! So I edited the files to remove those links, and added links to my design and hosting websites instead, to link it up with the rest of my website’s content. Removing some of the affiliate material has also left a gap, which I will eventually aim to fill with something promoting my own economy website packages, extra e-commerce services and products.

Being wary of the whims of Google, I also realised a turnkey shop like this would be duplicated quite a few times around the web. In fact, I ran a quick Copyscape check on the home page and found 8 other template shops. A mass of identical affiliate content like that on an otherwise almost nonexistent website could easily trigger off a duplicate content penalty and leave me trailing on page 700 in the search engines’ results. So I created a file called robots.txt for my hosting site, which I designed to prevent search engines from indexing my turnkey store. The obvious downside is that visitors will not be finding this site’s content through search engines - they will only be coming in through advertising or from the rest of my site. So I’d have to promote this shop in other ways to make it sell anything, but at least the rest of my websites’ content would not be suffering.

The next thing I noticed was that the template prices were all in US dollars. I had a look around in the Template Monster affiliate area, but could not find a way to change the currency. So I integrated the foreign currency conversion tool from xe.com into the resources section of my web design site, with customised number entry and results pages. I added links to the currency converter from my web design packages and my template shop, and then added links to those from the currency converter. Seems like it all goes round in circles!

I noticed the code in the html files would not validate to web standards, so a standards compliance and accessibility overhaul will be the next areas of work lined up for this shop - it can’t be finished until it’s accessible at least, and there are definite problems with a lack of alternative text replacements for images and scripts.

In the meantime, I needed to get my web design packages online, and there were gaps that needed filling, so the template store went online at an early stage and has been experiencing gradual improvements. Amazingly, it had a visitor from my hosting site in its first day, but in the few days since then it’s remained fairly quiet. Overall, though, I’ve been pleased with how easy it was to get a turnkey store online - it still needs some work, and it hasn’t made any money yet, but it adds another service to my website, it didn’t take much work (so far!), and we’ll see how it does in time.

Just got this email from PayPal, Introducing my all in one payment solution… Huh? What do PayPal think, that I want to keep paying and paying, in every way I can? Thanks so much, PayPal, for making this possible. *

* I may be taking this the wrong way

I made an annoying discovery the other week: my site was tanking in Google, and they thought it was about PC World and Misco. I’d put affiliate ads on my home page to recommend some relevant products - or so I thought. But once I’d written about them, loaded the banners and added the accessible alternative text for those without javascript and images, that was a lot of mentions for unusual keywords that didn’t fit my web content as well as I’d thought. My home page had lost its focus.

So I moved the affiliate content (mostly) off the main pages and into separate areas in subdirectories, like a resources section and a shop. I’ll keep an eye on how this arrangement works and consider blocking those subdirectories from search engines altogether (although surprisingly, while trailing way down in Google listings I was on page one in Yahoo and MSN - what the ?!?).

I hope I’ve cut them down enough now, but it’s easy to overdo it with affiliate ads, and sometimes it takes an outsider (like Google, unfortunately) to make you realise it. I hope I make a comeback soon.