Is there any money left?

For a while I was testing out the virtual world / MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) that is Second Life, just exploring and trying to figure out what it was about. I had a window in the background all the time, where my character was dancing around, camping and earning Linden Dollars at an almost Adsense-like rate.

Then work and other things took over for a while, but I had this strange lonely feeling. There was no pretend other person dancing around on my computer. I was wondering what kind of game Second Life is - if it even is a game in the truest sense. It has no predefined goal, so is it a game in itself, or some kind of virtual-world toy? Does it become another game when people bring their own goals into it? Perhaps.

I found many people who were beginners, like me. Some wanted to talk about life around the world. Many seemed to be playing with dolls, while some were playing with building blocks and Lego. Others still were playing Monopoly. I personally liked the Vulcan city, complete with Vulcan language and culture. But I think I was still playing Neko.

Click below to read more: I’ve put Web Neko onto his own page since he hasn’t been loading today (fingers crossed - hope he comes back!)
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One of the first things I discovered in Second Life is that you need money to buy land or rent a shop front.
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(The first couple of months, warts and all)

Click to view all Stairway to Devon posts

Background: I’ve been working on Stairway to Devon, a Devon directory with a focus on promoting arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.

Summary: Once the website got to the point of being presentable enough, I started gradually making it more available, while continuing to work on the site, and beginning to actively promote it. This is how I did that and what happened.

July 2007
Started leaving it online for search engines to index. Created a Google XML Sitemap to help with this and opened a Google Webmaster Tools account.

End of July - Linked to it from a news item on my company site’s home page, offering free advertising to customers.

Mid August - added links to it from my customers’ websites (after asking them of course!)

25/8 Ordered business cards and postcards from

30/8 Applied for affiliate programmes via TradeDoubler and others.

31/8 Added it to my online portfolio of work

Comments with Hindsight:

With hindsight, much more testing was needed before linking to the site from anywhere. However, the budget (0!) did not allow for hiring someone else to test it. I felt that I had tested it thoroughly myself, without realising the extent to which as the developer I had developed blindspots relating to possible ways the site could be used, my own skills and assumptions, my own knowledge of the site’s functioning, and so on. Some of these issues may have been picked up before launching if I had paid or persuaded an outsider to test the site. (I tried persuading several, and that helped me fix several usability issues and bugs early on, but most people I approached, even with offers of freebies, were so busy that most of them never got round to it, and a few did test something, but with the best will in the world, the time a volunteer can offer is minimal (though still useful and appreciated - these few people’s help found the most basic problems early on!).

Without paying for testing, you are in a difficult situation: your earliest visitors are more like guinea pigs than they may realise, and they are unlikely to tell you if anything went wrong unless they are charged for it. I had to figure out many of the early problems using web statistics, and found the visitor tracking provided by my javascript statistics from Statcounter, were the only clues I had to how people used the site and why certain things were going wrong.

Regarding banners, adsense and monetising the site in general, many people advise filling a directory first and then thinking about how to monetise it (others disagree). My own opinion is that if the site is ready enough and the space is there for advertising (without conflicting with usability), you might as well get some professional looking adverts appearing in it, as this demonstrates the advertising potential to other advertisers that could purchase ad space directly (which is very unlikely before the content and visitor numbers are there). There’s also the possibility of earning something, however small: as an example, in the first few months this site made nothing from affiliate commissions, but a small amount began to appear via Google adsense. Around Christmas, we saw a small amount of TradeDoubler and Amazon Associates commissions. None of this is money you would leave in the street, however, it’s clear that the main income from a directory would come from either selling adspace directly or charging either for listings or for some aspect of the listings (featured listings being a common option). For either of these options to attract buyers, a directory needs to reach a critical mass of pages listed and readers visiting (which the pages bring in via search engines). To keep visitors returning, listings must also be of a reliable enough quality to maintain the directory’s good name.

From my own point of view as a web developer / designer, the site has paid for itself far more in providing a more technically advanced addition to my portfolio, a means to offer free advertising to my customers, and an opportunity to learn, gain experience of running a directory, and keep improving on new skills.

So to summarise the earliest stage: if a web project has any kind of budget to spend on it, earmark a large proportion of it for hiring outsiders to test it. Also, get the basics of the site’s earning potential in place - this can always be adjusted later. Install detailed web statistics, so you can get an idea of how people are using the site. After testing, the most important issue for a directory is to get enough quality listings in, while it’s important with any new site to keep a close eye on the visitor statistics in case common problems are preventing potential customers using your site.

The next installment of this blog will discuss the early steps I took to get listings in, and the first experiences with outsiders using the site.

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).

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.

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.

Useful products and services, from Beach Web Design Shop.

Having adventured enough with Google AdSense for a while, I took some time out to reorganise my affiliate shop. When I was going through my business startup programme and organising my website and computing equipment, I looked for affiliate programmes for companies and products that were useful and good value. The shop is a collection of these recommended products.

It was originally one long page that was linked from my holding page and was quite slow to load, so I’ve now reorganised it into separate pages, grouped into product types:

• Recommended books, to be expanded in future with more reviews
• Broadband, internet connection equipment and web hosting services
• Recommended computer equipment and upgrades for home based offices
• Recommended internet security products and information links for home based offices
• Phones and handheld devices
• Useful products for small businesses and startups
• Digital Photography

Hopefully these more specialised pages will be easier to find and use, not to mention much quicker to load.

The main page now features current special offers, but only those with adverts in 125×125 or 120×120 formats.

Many of the affiliate programmes keep sending me special offers and discount codes, so I will aim to make more of this with special offer pages in future.

I am so happy with TradeDoubler! I was having trouble getting their ads into my blog because the WordPress code was stopping their Javascript from working. I’d checked the WordPress help site, and the first thing I found out was that for anything involving Javascript, you need to turn off the default WordPress ‘rich editor’ and use the plain HTML editor instead. This is done by selecting the option ‘Users -> Profile’ and deselecting this box:

Deselecting the visual rich editor in the user profile screen

The WordPress website also advised creating an external javascript file and calling it from the WordPress PHP header template file (these are filed under a directory called ‘themes’). It was quite a trawl through the help site finding out how to do that, and once I’d done it it worked in Firefox but not Internet Explorer.

So I sent this message to TradeDoubler customer support yesterday using their website contact form:

Hi, please can you tell me how I can add adverts to my wordpress blog? I’ve tried adding them in the html editor and they don’t appear at all. I’ve also tried adding them using an external javascript file called in the header template (as wordpress suggest) and they appear in firefox but not internet explorer. Have you got any advice on this please?
Thanks

And today, just a day later, I got this reply, which not only fixed the problem but included a screen capture showing how to do it (code with IDs removed):

Hi Annabel

Thank you for contacting TradeDoubler.

I am afraid I am unfamiliar with the Wordpress Blog software. What I can suggest is that when attempting to insert the links into the HTML editor you ensure the ‘Use case prevention’ option is deselected on the ‘Show Code’ page. The ‘Use case prevention’ element of the link scripted in Java Script and therefore may be causing you problems in the HTML editor. Please see image below detailing how to remove this feature:

If you have anything else I can help you with, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind Regards,

Mark Andrews
PUBLISHER EXECUTIVE

1) FAQ - Click here for online support
2) Account Manager Contact Details

So I tried it and it works - it produces a plain HTML link instead of the Javascript, and this can be added using the WordPress HTML editor.
I think they deserve another advert for that:

Affiliate Marketing

How it began

I started the affiliate marketing in October 2006 after my friend and fellow Women’s Business startup mate Jude went to a Stores Online Pro presentation in Plymouth. She almost persuaded me to go, saying how slick and American he was, how convincing and persuasive, but somehow that didn’t get me up at 6am for the drive.

We both found the £1000+ set up fee a little steep, but we liked the idea of waking up every morning several hundreds of pounds richer, just from advertising other peoples’ websites. I’m sure there’s a lot more to it, but I thought I’d give it a go on a smaller scale.

VistaPrint

The first company I found with an affiliate programme was VistaPrint. I had got free business cards from them, and liked their system for creating other stationery items with the same design. Once I had ordered their free business cards, they kept sending me special offers for other free things, and I have now got fridge magnets, a notepad, return address labels and a Christmas rubber stamp with penguins on it, all for the price of postage. Next time round I’m planning for compliment slips, letterhead paper, postcards and post-its. I’ll only get £2 if you order something from them, but I recommend it anyway.

TradeDoubler

I looked at the bottom of their website and saw a link that said ‘Partnership Opportunities’, which led me to their affiliate programme with TradeDoubler. And that’s how I found out about TradeDoubler.

TradeDoubler is an organisation that manages affiliate programmes for lots of other companies. It is free to join as a publisher (ie someone with a website to host the adverts) and it provides facilities on its website for setting up the adverts, identifies which websites people are using to click on the adverts, keeps track of page impressions (how many times the page loads and the advert is seen), clicks, click through rates (what percentage of page impressions result in clicks on each advert), and resulting sales.

When a sale or other event occurs that would result in commission for the advertiser, TradeDoubler records it, collects the money from the advertiser, waits 2 months in case the sale is refunded, and pays the publisher once there is at least £30 in their account*. Which makes me wonder how they paid me £5.15 in December, but that was nice!

*Since then they have paid me another £21.50, so I must have got that part about waiting for each £30 mixed up. My experience so far has been that they wait 2 months in case items are returned and refunded and then they pay whatever commission has been earned.

TradeDoubler also say, “Affiliates are allowed to buy via their own links and encouraged to do so. ” I wasn’t sure if this meant I would get commissions on my own purchases, but it seemed to work out - I would recommend this programme to anyone! A PDF format instruction file for TradeDoubler can be found here

NetLawman

The next advertisers I signed up with were Amazon and NetLawman, because there was a particular book I wanted to recommend from Amazon, and NetLawman’s programme produced a page section on Legal Documents for E-Commerce and the Internet that looked like a useful resource to include in my website.

Amazon

Amazon was also free to join and looked quite exciting at first. I couldn’t tell from my initial reading whether they counted your own purchases for commissions - it turns out that these appear in your account balance for a while and then go away again. They also require you to have a minimum balance before they pay you, in this case £25. But I spread the word about my website and made some commission from the Christmas shopping season. Now I’m waiting to see what has happened to it, as their records show a direct debit of £18.58 that hasn’t appeared in my bank. I’ve emailed Amazon support, so we’ll wait and see*.

*Almost a month and many emails later, I am still waiting for this payment from Amazon.

So as a round-up of my first affiliate marketing Christmas season, I certainly haven’t woken up each day earning hundreds, but I may have made £40 - £50. Getting the money is trickier though: both Amazon and TradeDoubler payments require a minimum account balance that takes a lot of commissions to accumulate. Perhaps I will get more when my website is finished and receives more visitors (I hope!), but I can’t see it picking up that much momentum again before next Christmas. On the other hand, it’s extra cash for not much work, so whenever I get it it will be a nice bonus.

I plan to continue with affiliate marketing that adds related content and resources to my site. When I have more time in future I plan to try out some of the more gung ho methods that full time affiliate marketers use, like setting up online affiliate stores and promoting them to generate more visitor traffic.