I’ve spent much of the sunny weekend, inside catching-up on two weeks worth of emails. Having read them once, when I log into Affiliate Window I then have to re-read and accept the “Unread Priority” messages that are highlighted in red as soon as I log in. They must be important, some have three exclamation marks.

I’m not convinced that they are indeed “Priority”. They include ‘program closures’, ‘postponed launches’ and “15% Fixed Rate of Commission for August 07!!!”. Come on, surely I don’t need to know about a fixed rate of commission? Do I?

It’s not the type of email I would ever read as commission levels don’t interest me. I’d rather make ten sales at 5% using a discount code, than no sales at 15%, without one.

So I read on past the hype “you will be in the money”. This is where I’m ready to hit delete (or “submit” in the case of the Affiliate Window interface.)

Then I catch the “Priority” part of the message …
“… affiliates are not allowed to promote any BoysStuff.co.uk discount codes. Doing so may result in pending transactions being cancelled or temporary suspension from the programme.”

Ah that sounds important. Less of the sales time wasting message and onto the hard facts. Why couldn’t that have been in the subject line instead?

I’m in the middle of a two week holiday abroad but I’m still very much in touch with my business, using the Internet on my mobile phone.

Opera Mini

This Internet browsing application is amazing and works for java enabled phones. Here are just some of the websites I am able to access whilst I am away from a computer.

Google Mail

All my personal and business email is forwarded to my Google mail account. I’ve currently got 540 unread emails in my inbox but using my filtering techniques I can quickly see that 28 include the word “codes” and so are likely to include new discount codes for my site. 27 include the word “voucher”, 136 refer to “sales” and 6 are for “closures”. By using the filtering I can read the emails I consider to be the most important first.

Statistics

I can quickly see live daily traffic statistics and what keywords are driving visitors to the site. Whilst I use Google Analytics, I always check Statcounter first as the page formats very well on my Sony Ericsson K800i.

RSS Feeds

By subscribing to my favourite web sites I can keep up with the latest posts on Affiliates4u.com and away from the business keep up with what’s happening at Middlesbrough Football Club and see what my friends are doing on Facebook.

So in summary, using my mobile phone I can always keep up-to-date with what’s important to me via accessing email, forums and social media sites.

I was shocked to read this email today from a merchant, asking me to stop Google spidering my site. This blog includes posts of how I try to improve my rankings, so why when I get to the top of page one, after 39 days of using legitimate search engine optimisation, would I want anything else?

The email went as such:

“If you type {merchant X} in Google you get your site with the shop code on the first page and from checking my discount record it would appear that more people are using the code than the commission that I pay you. Can you install a robot txt to ensure that Google does not pick up your page for my site?”

If each merchant were to send me the same request and I did that, then I may as well stick to my nine-to-five.
Shop Codes is currently receiving record levels of traffic yet despite that, this particular merchant’s page is rarely visited.

It has only been viewed a total of 33 times by 25 unique visitors in the last 30 days, peaking with 5 views on 14th July 2007.

In the last 30 days, there have only been 15 visits from people searching with the keyword {merchant X}.

It appears the real issue is that people are using my site as a resource and I am not receiving commission for every person that goes on to purchase. I am fine with that as long as the majority of people still click the affiliate links. Many code sites have gone down the route of hiding the codes or framing the merchants sites. Going down this route just makes the code one further click away. Then, when the user clicks to reveal, the merchants site opens up in a new browser window. This may make me more money by having more cookies installed but I am satisfied with my current revenues, not to have to use this approach.

But to tell Google to ignore my site would be business suicide. Only last month all my pages were stuck in the Supplemental index or on page 37 and that was not a good place to be in.

It’s just after midnight on 10th July 2007. I’ve another two hours before I go to bed as there’s something stopping me. It’s the new site visitors hungry for discount codes. I’ve not seen activity like this for 39 days.
I’d consider June a “quiet” month for Shop Codes. During May my traffic was climbing each day and daily sales were surpassing December figures consistently. Then this graph shows the sudden decline I experienced from 31st May 11:30pm.

So June dipped a lot but it was only a huge blow because I was used to better times. However, this happened to be a little wake up call. Now that the audience wasn’t there I knew I could “tinker” with the site and basically have nothing to lose.

Google didn’t stop delivering traffic to my site. It just didn’t link to many “shop” pages, instead it was just happy to send me people to my home page.

So the traffic is back (maybe another 30 days?) and one or more of these beliefs and actions helped it along the way …

FIX 1: Add a search box to the home page.

Before I could please the search engines I had to take care of the visitors. I previously didn’t have a search on my site as I want people to navigate past related items, click links and not go for the easy option. With a search they may not see related offers.

FIX 2: Change page titles.

I’d already gotten into the habit of producing dynamic page titles dependant on the content. If I didn’t have a code say for Argos, I wouldn’t say I had in the titles or other meta data. Each time I add a new offer to the page, the page title reflects the new offer. And if the search engine is saying that my site is offering a June offer but it’s now July’s offer. That’s a bad reflection on their part and not my site. They just need to come and spider a bit more frequently.

FIX 3. Re-write all urls.

I re-wrote all my urls so that they were consistent. I used to serve the same pages at different urls so the keywords within them would be highlighted in the search result pages. This resulted in duplicate content and unintentional spidering and lots of pages going straight into the supplemental index.

FIX 4. Remove distractions.

I had a WordPress version of my site which was only a few months old. It was effectively a duplicate copy but without the heavy images and a better url structure. When my Shop Codes traffic dipped, it wasn’t a surprise to see that one of my major competitor sites, happened to be myself. So rather go with that one, I killed it, albeit not totally intentionally.

FIX 5. Grab that tail
Once my site was taking its shape it was time to look at the content on the pages. I’ve decided to target three keyword phrases for each merchant I promote. As an example for Petmeds, I am explicitly looking to tap the market of users searching for “Petmeds Coupon Code”.

FIX 6. Use the meta tools to be descriptive
My targeted keywords were moved to the front of the page titles and repeated in the description. I’m a firm believer that sites that stuff their descriptions with repeated keywords will soon fall from grace. Look again at the Petmeds example above. The page title and description say exactly what is on the page. OK, I may not receive visitors searching for “Petmeds voucher code” but don’t bet against it. Simplicity wins. On that note, one of my next tasks is to make sure all pages include no more than five keywords.

FIX 7. Diversify.

I’ve now got an RSS feed and a newsletter that goes out every other day with 50 subscribers. That’s approximately one new sign-up per day. In both cases the content is being pushed to different audiences. My codes are syndicated on other sites and with email, subscribers can browse at their leisure.

FIX 8. Add more distractions.

Knowing that my WordPress blog was doing well for itself on another domain, I brought it ‘inside’. Some of these new pages were quickly indexed and started ranking higher than the ‘originals’ which were in the Supplemental.

FIX 9. Truly believe content is king.

With unique content or a unique spin on the same content, a site will stand out. So I continued to press for new exclusive codes and continued to update the regular offers long into the night, despite knowing not so many people would get to see the information. Once the content is not updated then the search engines have a right not to visit.