A staggering one in every four of my legitimate ethical sales I make for Dorothy Perkins are declined. The reason stated is my site was ‘not last referrer’.

As my site doesn’t drop cookies for simply breathing the name, I can only assume that visitors have been at Dorothy Perkins checkout; searched for a Dorothy Perkins code in Google; spotted my site; then clicked on one of the promotional links that I’ve built for them; then they’ve gone back to Google and repeated the search process looking for a code.

That could make sense if I even ranked for ‘Dorothy Perkins voucher codes’ in Google.

Over the 8 months of this year I’ve listed 9 different promotions for Dorothy Perkins, including a 50% Summer Sale, 15% Exclusive voucher and a free gift promotion code and so on.

The page has been viewed 1,241 times by 995 unique visitors.

Those 995 visitors made a total of 83 purchases, spending over £4,500.

Of those 83 sales, 22 were declined.  This represents one-third of my total declined sales made on the Affiliate Window network, where Dorothy presides.

22 declined sales equates to £99 worth of commission.

These figures put me off wanting to promote the merchant further. They are obviously doing something different than other merchants are. Maybe they are just more dilligent at checking last referrer stats.

Either way, I’d have rather have not made the sale in the first place if I wasn’t going to be paid for it.

22 other affiliates received that commission or maybe one other affiliate received 22 lots of commission for doing what I did but a little later.

Who knows? Does Dorothy?

Here’s an open letter to Kirsty, author of the influential affiliate $tuff blog. I’ve been busy of late on a site that is going to get more popular as winter approaches but the site isn’t currently set up with advertising. So I’m asking helpful Kirsty for a bit of advice on how to make a bit more pocket money.

Dear Kirsty,

I’ve just relaunched a site that was badly neglected. It regularly had thousands of visitors daily peaking at 125,000 and I didn’t think anything of it but only recently that figure dropped to a lowly 200.

I’ve removed all of the original content of the site and I have spent the first few weeks of August re-building up the pages based around my previous most popular keywords and images.

After it’s redesign launch four weeks ago, I’m now attracting 1,000-4,000 unique visitors daily looking at between 5,000-22,000 pages and this figure is climbing daily.

I’m not quite sure of the traffic as Servage, Statcounter and Google Analytics are all giving me different results. This may be down to how I am presenting the content. The graph above displays the lowest figures of the three, so it’s looking promising.

Speaking of Google, they have been in touch to say that I can’t promote Google Adsense on the site. You see the content is a bit risque, as you’ll soon tell from my most popular pages:

/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-upskirt/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-see-through/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-flashing/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-nipple-slip/

I’m wondering how I can monetise the site. I don’t want to fill it with full adult porn adverts, so is there anything more subtle I could do?

I’m sure many merchants in the affiliate marketing space won’t want to be associated with a site that focuses on drunk celebrities and includes the odd not-safe-for-work image. The site has profited in the early days though from promoting the likes of Figleaves and JackpotJoy with traditional banners.

I’ve also spotted that a link from my Befuddle home page to an rss feed of my shopping site ShopCodes is ranking highly for some voucher code related keywords. So whilst that page was created as an experiment, I think the site has the potential to exploit the retail market.

Google certainly seems to like the influence of it’s status, being eight years old with a PR4 and it’s Wordpress formatting.

My pages are being indexed within hours of posting. The quickest I’ve spotted is two hours between page creation and the page to be indexed by Google on page 1 and for someone to search for a celebrity and land on my site.

The site is on page 1 of Google for the following terms if not the #1 spot itself.

# drunk celebs
# drunk celebrities
# celebs
# uk celebs

Who or what can I promote? You’ll see there’s an advert on there for an adult dating site but that is merely a place holder as I want to see what click-throughs it receives. (At the time of writing, it’s got a CTR of 1.02%)

I also know I’ve got a worldwide audience. Visitors from 147 different countries have visited just recently and this is broken down as such …

The UK appears low at 8% but Analytics says the UK accounts for 33% of my traffic and the visitors spend an average of 4.5 minutes viewing content. They seem to stick around

All the best. Cheers,
Ray