SuitcaseLifestyle.com

Apart from my E-commerce ventures, I still do a bit of affiliate marketing in one niche… Dating.

Like most affiliate blogs, I ain’t going to say shit about how or what offers I promote. But I will divulge a bit of history on how this niche became a good money-maker for me. The same principal applies to all niches. Focus on quality and you’ll make more in the long term.

When I first began promoting dating sites, I like most affiliates, did whatever I could to sign up leads. In the beginning that was mostly done by signing up lesbians. Lesbians in general provide a higher than average conversion rate, the downside is that for the advertiser, only about 2-3% of these leads will convert to sales. So in short, I’d jump on dating offers, sign up lesbians until the advertisers realized my traffic quality sucked and I’d get kicked off the offers and move on to the next.

Over time I improved and got better at promoting dating, so I started to sign up high quality leads, and stopped signing up lesbians. Fast forward to now, I’ve built up great relationships with my affiliate managers, who know that I send nothing but quality leads when it comes to dating offers.

So now on my favorite networks, I’m always given higher payouts, and put onto private offers that aren’t available to most affiliates. Getting access to these private offers and payouts means I don’t have to compete with the majority of affiliates because I can outbid them and still make good bank, while they lose money.

To summarize: Find your niche, focus and drive quality, get better payouts and make bank. With the flood of newbies into this business, spreading yourself too thin won’t work out so well in the long term.

So now it’s been roughly 3 months since I started my e-commerce business, so it’s time for an update. I wanted to share a bit more on my blog, thankfully my business is not pure affiliate marketing so I don’t care about keeping secrets.

One of my earlier posts, titled Blueprint – Make Stacks Online, I laid out 10 steps to build a successful e-commerce site based on real tangible products. Now since I wrote that, I have pretty much completed all the 10 steps laid out in that post.

So how is the business doing?

Firstly, I created my own brand of Colored Contact Lenses. This was to give myself a competitive edge against my competitors by having a different product. And also in the longer term, the brand can become another business in itself. In the beginning, I ordered what I thought was a lot (1000 pairs) to get me started. These arrived at the start of December, and I started slinging these like no tomorrow via PPC and Social media ads.

I got so carried away with selling, that I didn’t keep an eye on stock levels and nearly ran out by early February. Now being a physical product, it takes roughly 3 weeks to get more stock in, so I had to pause all my ads and sit idle for 2 weeks doing nothing. I guess you could call it a schoolboy error, but a good one.

This is part of the growing pains of dealing with a physical product. You want to be sure you can move stock otherwise it just ties up capital. This is a downside to dealing with physical products rather than digital, as obviously with physical products, you can only sell what you have. However at the same time this is an advantage, because there will always be demand for physical products which cannot be replaced easily.

Initially, I was selling to Australia only, using a .com.au domain. But I did mention the best way to go international was to use multiple TLD’s as I covered in my Subdomain vs Subdirectory post. So I have also started selling to the UK(co.uk) and US(.com) markets, all the while shipping out of Australia. If you plan to sell internationally, you NEED to do this. Also don’t be lazy and take the time to create unique content for each site rather than clone it, it will pay off, trust me.

So within 3 months of launching, turnover is now into the 5 figures a month range, the next target will 6 figures a month which will in turn make it a 7 figure business. I expect this will take longer than 3 months.

So to take this business to the next level…

Optimize and Expand

By optimizing, it’s a two-part process, firstly, conversion rate. That means I’ve installed heatmaps(Crazyegg.com) to start tracking what users do when they actually visit my websites, so I can see WHERE they click and from that, optimize the layout for maximum conversions. In the long term, this will also benefit affiliates with a higher EPC. I’ll post examples of how this is useful as soon as my sites collect more data from CrazyEgg.

This stage will also include multi-variate testing of the landing page to test different versions of headlines, text and images to find the optimal layout of text, headlines and graphics. By optimizing the site for conversions, this will greatly help myself and affiliates make money, which will be one of the main factors when I gun for 6 figures a month.

The second part of optimizing will be to lower traffic costs. Without a doubt, Adwords has the potential to drive a metric shit ton of sales, and it currently does. At the same time, Adwords is expensive, so part of my optimization will include breaking down my current campaigns, tearing them apart, and putting them back up with the goal of getting EVERY KEYWORD to have a Quality Score of 10. If this means having a separate landing page for each keyword, so be it. When you look long term, 1 particular keyword could be spending $20,000 in one year. This keyword and it’s associated performance is a business in itself. So it pays not to be lazy, the smallest difference in QS could be thousands of dollars in extra profits.

Expanding the business will be a 3 part strategy. First is to expand to more geographic locations. At the time of writing, the main markets I am targeting are AU, US and UK. Future plans include CA and NZ and then moving onto foreign locations in different languages. Realize that for a product website like mine in a country like Australia with 20 million people, you can easily earn a living. What happens when you expand into the US(320 million), UK(80 million) etc? A lot of foreign countries have huge populations with credit card happy populations(Spain, France, Italy etc). The potential is fucking HUGE.

The second part of my expansion strategy is to list on affiliate networks, in the end I would like to try listing as both CPA and CPS networks. I’m still trying to switch card processors and a few things like that which is delaying me on this stage.

The third part of my expansion has nothing to do with expanding, but streamlining the business. At the moment everything is being shipped out of Australia, while generally things arrive within a reasonable time frame, it’s not the ideal situation. The goal here is to have 3 distribution centers, North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific, which will speed up delivery times.

Now the last step in my plan.

Be a lazy fucker

Yep, the last phase of the plan is for me to step away from the business and have it run on its own. Once business is running a lot smoother and I can break down business operations into menial tasks, my plan is to hire more staff to handle all the shit for me, so I can go sail the Caribbean instead of working.

If anyone can give me pointers on where to hire people for customer support, and basic per hour labor, get in touch – we should chat.

I escaped Buenos Aires on Sunday and headed 5 hours down the coast to Mar Del Plata, a seaside beach city. I should be surfing or something now but it’s raining like ‘gatos y perros’ so I’m stuck inside updating this blog.

In the mean time, find me on Facebook.

Here are a few photos I’ve taken on my trips. I’ll try to make this a more frequent thing.

One last thing: BE MY FRIEND ON FACEBOOK.

The Roskilde Festival in Denmark

The San Blas Islands in the Caribbean off the east coast of Panama

Gas Chamber in Mauthausen Concentration camp, Austria

Roman Abramoviches 'Pelorus' spotted in Helsinki

The Blue Lagoon, Iceland. Shame it was overcast that day.

Jesus, ever since moving into my new place(I’m living with mostly students), I can wander into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and stumble out 3 hours later drunk. Does not make me very productive but fuckit, it’s good fun.

So recently I’ve been playing with datafeeds from ShareASale, in particular, mashing multiple datafeeds together. This is part of my plan to generate a more stable affiliate income. I figured due to the code/time needed to make these, for every 100 affiliates who consider this kind of project, less than 5% will actually do it(and from my research, probably far less than 5%). And once you make a working site, it’s pretty easy to copy everything into a new template with a new datafeed and have another site.

I won’t cover actually making a site using a datafeed, but if you don’t have any programming or database experience, this is the kind of perfect project to learn on. Basically shove thousands of products into a database, and then display them on a site, not so difficult! My first working site had less than 100 lines of PHP code. It’s now way beyond that, but it’s a good learning exercise anyway.

Because most datafeeds have lots of products and you’re basically spitting products out of a database, it’s easy to have a brand new domain, 0 days old with 100,000 pages… After which, the site never changes. From a SEO standpoint, that’s not so good. So here’s what I implemented.

The Auto-Growing Website

So rather than have a new domain with 100,000 pages, each new site will have around 10. And as the site gets more hits, it will grow accordingly. If you know databases, you’ll know that it’s simply one extra boolean field in the database such as ‘active’ 0 or 1.

Cronjobs would of been an option, but I wanted ensure that the site grew as it’s popularity did, so it needed to be based on visitors.

At first I tried this: Every time a visitor hits a product page, one new product is released. This did not work so well, because products were being unlocked way too fast by Googlebots, and the entire site would be unlocked in no time.

So to slow it down and make it more variable, and here’s exactly what I did:

//Unlock more products
$lottery = rand(1,5);
if ($lottery == 1) {
unlock_product();
}

If this makes no sense to you, “Select a random number between 1 and 5, if it is number 1, unlock another product”.

This will greatly slow down the speed in which products get unlocked, and you can slow it down or increase as you like by increasing or decreasing the random number pool.

This simple little function means you can create affiliate datafeed sites with thousands of pages, and leave them growing on their own, giving them a more natural growth pattern.

I’ve only been playing with these for a few weeks, but I’m seeing definite improvements in terms of indexed pages vs previous sites I made which were brand new with thousands of pages, never to be updated again.

If you’re not already with ShareASale, join up!

Ok well the suitcase is a lie, it’s a wheeled duffel bag.

So here is a photo of the things I travel with:

My stuff

To put it more accurately, this is all I live with. One bag of mostly clothes, and another with laptop and goodies, in case you’re curious…

Goodies

Goodies include: Macbook Pro 15″, Kindle, 1 Terabyte of external storage and a Rado watch.

What you see in the above 2 photos, is more or less pretty much all my possessions. I do have a suitcase of spare clothes, and box of old school photos and yearbooks that I leave at my dads place.

I remember when I left home for the first time to go backpacking in 2007, my backpack weighed 17.8kg, and that was traveling Europe in the summer. Now my I carry crap for all types of weather and my bag is now down to 14.4kg. Really is surprising how little a person needs to live a comfortable life.

Now a little bit about The Lifestyle.

It’s not about sitting on some beautiful beach in the Caribbean while doing nothing. I do put in regular hours, recently… long hours. I work at home, like a lot of other internet marketers, except that my home tends to change every few months. It’s nice stepping outside and being surprised by new things constantly, and when I do take time off, I get to do and see some pretty cool stuff.

I have been posting a lot of rubbish lately, so my next post will be back on topic with some affiliate sites I’ve been making using datafeeds.

Thought I’d drop a quick post now that I’m here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s nice and hot here, and I’m loving it! If anyone is from around here, hit me up, I have lots of time to hang around and talk shit.

I’m still jet-lagged and operating on opposite hours to everyone else. But rather than try to fight it and adjust like normal people. I’ve decided I will do whatever feels right at the moment. So… If I’m tired, I’ll go to sleep. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat. And in between I’ll try to get some work done!

The past few days I’ve been busy looking for places to stay. I had the option of getting an apartment to myself, or get a room in a shared house. I decided to get a room in a shared house. The main reason being that I’d rather be around people, otherwise I might get into the bad habit of overworking and never leaving the house(like when I was in Thailand). On top of all that, it’s cheaper as well.

FYI. An apartment to rent in Buenos Aires will set you back about $500-1000US a month for a decent apartment. Ballers can go higher of course. A room in a place with human beings will set you back generally around $300-450US a month. There is definitely no shortage of decent places to live in BA, there are TONS of places available here.

I ended up choosing the second place I saw. I’ll be living in a large apartment with 4 girls, in the Monserrat area, it would have been nice to at least have another male in the place, but whatever…

I move in on the 1st of Feb, and then I can start to work properly again and hopefully find a gym in the area.

My plans are to stay in BA for maybe 2-3 months, until it starts to get closer to Winter, and then start heading north towards Colombia. My affiliate income has pretty much dried up at the moment, thanks to Facebook disabling my account, so I need to get some things rolling to give me a reason to head to ASE in New York later in the year.

So I’m glad I have my e-commerce business running which is the one stable income source I’ll always have. My affiliate work continues to continually get shutdown by external shit which is really annoying. I’m thinking I might start working with some CPS networks like ShareASale and look for some more stable projects.

I’m really looking forward to this year, it’s been nearly 3 years since I decided to become a roaming nomad, pretty amazing to think back at all the ground I covered…

In May of 2007, I left Melbourne and went to: England, France, Monaco, Italy, Vatican City, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Germany, Lichtenstein, Holland, Belgium, London, Sweden, Finland, Romania, Hungry, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, Holland, London, Mykonos, Ios, London, USA, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Peru and Colombia(where I spent NYE). I know I listed a few places there 2-3 times, but they are listed in the order I went to them.

In 2008, I continued: Colombia, Chile, New Zealand, Australia(East & West coast), London, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, London, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, New York, Guatemala, Australia(for NYE).

In 2009, I continued again: Australia, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Colombia, New York(for ASE09), London, Malaysia, Hong, Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia(for NYE).

For the record, 2009 was the worst fucking year ever. On top of the economic crisis, nothing for me worked very well work wise. I had the most amazing shitty luck possible, whenever I’d be up, something would come and demolish my progress. A mega-shit 2009 is one of the main reasons I’m working alot harder now, my security cushion is getting a little thin. So I’m very happy that 2009 is over, things are already looking better a few days into 2010!

For 2010, I kind of forgot about Affiliate Summit West in Vegas this month. I really would have loved to have gone, it would have been EPIC. I booked a non-refundable flight Sydney to Buenos Aires, I could have changed the date, but there was no fucking way I’m flying Melbourne-Vegas-Sydney-Argentina. So I’ll be back at ASE later in the year!

My work plans for this year, is to get my E-commerce biz steamrolling. So far things are running slowly but surely. The main thing I would like to do is get my site listed with a bunch of affiliate networks and recruit some ballers, so I’m still doing alot of in-house testing now and getting everything perfect. Probably still a few months away. On top of that, continue to work on SEO for the sites a bit, and as I get more time, start getting back into some affiliate marketing.

Travel plans for this year, well in a bit under 2 weeks, I’m off to Argentina. Last time I was there in 2007, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, but now I speak it fairly well, so I’m really looking forward to going back. I’ll probably look for an apartment to rent once I get there. With a 3 month tourist visa, I think I might max the 3 months before moving on. I definitely have to visit friends in Colombia, and maybe in Bolivia. Other than that I have no plans. I think my goal will be to continue heading north in time for Affiliate Summit East, and after that… Who knows? Stay in the US for a while, or head to Europe or back to South America? or Asia?

When I pack up to leave my brothers place soon, I’ll take a photo of all my worldly possessions to show you, there really isn’t much… Most people spend their lives accumulating assets. I accumulate experiences, my memories are my biggest asset.

So I’m slowly building an E-commerce empire. SEO rankings are hugely important because it’s longterm free money. At the same time, I also want to rank well in multiple countries at the same time.

My original line of thinking was to build one domain and make it huge. This also conflicts with what my mentor taught me(Long story short, the guy who sparked my interest with E-Monies a few years ago), one of his lessons being, “don’t give users too much choice, get them to the credit card page in the least clicks possible“. So for that reason, I want my customers to think that the site they are buying from is local. If they are from the US, the site is going to be plastered with little US flags, and all prices will be in USD. If they are from the UK, the Union Jack will be around the place with all prices in GBP. It also helps to build trust. That aside, when deciding the best course of action, there are normally 2 schools of thought:

Subdomains: For example, us.widgets.com, uk.widgets.com and so on. Apart from being a little bit ugly, subdomains are more or less treated as individual domains, as they won’t pass any positive or negative to the main domain(there are exceptions but they aren’t important in this case).

Subdirectories: For example: www.widgets.com/us, www.widgets.com/uk and so on. Because these sit on top of the same domain, all the subdirectories benefit from the ever increasing authority of the main domain. The downside of this is because your site is more or less the same in multiple directories, you can face duplicate content penalties. From a search engine point of view, your cloning your shit on the same domain.

So which is the best option?

Neither… (But if you had to choose one, I would choose Subdomains).

The best thing to do in this case, is register every local TLD you can get your hands on. Yep:

bluewidgets.com (for the US)
bluewidgets.co.uk (for UK)
bluewidgets.com.au (for AU)
bluewidgets.ca (for CA)
bluewidgets.co.nz (for NZ)
etc

That should be enough to dominate the english markets before moving onto Spanish, French, German and eventual world domination. Just because you see large international companies using subdomains, doesn’t mean it’s the best thing. Either way, if you believe in your business, invest into your long term future and buy every TLD you can get! For an example of a company that does this very successfully, look at VistaPrint. I recently ordered some business cards from VistaPrint.com.au, and the cards came from the Netherlands. Avoid the “choose your local site” crap and get your users to the right site/currency/language straight off the bat.

It is impossible and unlikely that you’ll ever get a single domain to perform well(Top 10 for a decent/popular phrase) across multiple countries, and to be realistic with a long term business like E-Commerce, it really is not difficult to get into a top search position with some good old fashioned hard work and patience.

I have always noticed that local TLD’s perform better on search engines in their own local countries, so is definitely the best way to approach this.

If Google hasn’t banned you for advertising for life, congratulations!

I’m back using Adwords after 6 months, this time advertising as a merchant, which has given me some valuable insights.

Google Search Network

If you’re working with the Search network as an affiliate, the way to make money here is to dig deep and find the keywords that the merchants aren’t bidding on. This means going long tail and thinking out of the box with other names and mis-spellings of the term your bidding on. Custom landing pages(minisite landers) geared to take advantage of cheaper traffic that are still geared towards your target demographic are a good way to get decent QS and cheaper search traffic. I recommend starting with exact match and expand out when you figure shit out.

As I’m selling Coloured Contact Lenses, that is the #1 term for SEO and PPC that I’m gunning for. I own the product and therefore my margin is bigger than any affiliates, so there is no way any affiliate can bid on this term and make money. So… Using ‘coloured contact lenses’ as an example, my competition is other merchants. And this is where it gets a little fucked. I promote my own programs like I would any affiliate program, meaning that I track everything. The bids for this term are so high, and the competition so fierce, in the end the ROI is very slim.

So I dug a little deeper to see what other merchants in my niche were doing. No surprise they were going broad match(with little or no negatives), and direct linking with no tracking. So there’s a good chance they can’t distinguish between SEO sales and PPC sales and a merely blowing through a monthly budget. This of course is no good if you’re looking for a positive ROI. I find it difficult to get into the top 3 positions without losing money.

Bidding for position 1 isn’t usually worth the premium over position #2 and #3 which you can sometimes pick up for half the cost of #1. There are also theories that users that click on #2 or #3 are more targeted because there’s a higher chance they actually read your ad.

Tips to Optimize Search

Use the ‘Position Preference’ setting, I like positions #3 and #4 but test what works for you.

Use the conversion pixel to track conversions. Very important!

Put ads on even rotation, it makes it easier to see which ads perform better. Have 3 ads in rotation and continually cut the lowest performing and rewrite.

If your selling a product and bidding CPC, put a price in your ad. This will deter a small % of people who aren’t interesting in buying shit + It’ll save you a little coin. I have noticed in my own stats, that the earlier in the ad I mention the price(eg in the heading or start of first line), the higher the conversion rate.

Ad Scheduling: Keep an eye on your stats and figure out which hours/days convert best for you.

Content Network

The content network is a bit more complicated than search, and there are a few ways to approach it. CPC vs CPM? Text vs Image? Keywords vs Placements? I’ll assume that we are dealing with Cost-Per-Sale items here.

When dealing with the content network, you generally want a CTR of over .10%, this makes CPM more or less viable. The higher the better of course, because then clicks start getting alot cheaper.

CPC vs CPM

It’s important to understand the difference here in relation to achieving the best results for your dollar.

With CPC, when you are paying PER CLICK, you want targeted visitors, which I why I highly recommend putting the price of what your are selling in the ad. You WANT people to know you are selling something. If a dollar sign deters a visitor, good, they probably wouldn’t have bought anything and wasted your monies.

With CPM, and paying for impressions, you want as many clicks as possible, if your keywords and placements target your appropriate demographic, your goal here is MAXIMUM CLICKS. In other words… A high CTR. Try mixing up your CPC ad with ads that draw alot of attention.

Always let the stats do the talking, every niche converts differently.

Text vs Image Ads

I’m a fan of things that require work, because often things that require work come with a bigger payoff. A lot of merchants simply stick to text ads because it’s much easier to spend 5 minutes writing an ad, than 1 hour designing a banner in different sizes. Don’t be lazy, or be lazy and get a few banners designed by someone else.

It’s much easier to get a high CTR with an image ad. And if you use Photoshop, changing the text on a banner is easy.

Keywords vs Placements

Two very different ballgames that require different approaches.

Keywords

The general method here is to generate a HUGE fucking keyword list. Throw everything including the kitchen sink in. Use the Keyword Grouper tool inside the Adwords Editor, or whatever tools you have.

The trick with the content network is to cut any adgroups with a CTR of less than .10%. Let them run for a while, and then once you have your high performing adgroups, move them to CPM bidding to lower the click cost further.

Monitor CTR only to begin, as this will dictate your CPC whilst CPM bidding. Once you collect enough data, you will be able to see which adgroups are converting and which aren’t.

Placement Targeting

Tools like the Google Ad Planner and Quantcast will be your best friends here. Placements are a little more tricky than keywords because every site will behave differently. CTR will vary from site to site because of where the ad spots are placed and so on. So CPC/CPM bidding choice will depend on the site, as you could have a site with a fucking crap CTR but super high conversion rate and vice-versa.

If you have money to blow, load up your target demographic and blast it. CTR means alot less here, and money talks, so make sure you have a pixel placed so you can see which placements are performing and which aren’t.

Rather than just dumping 200 domains in to an adgroup and go, I’d highly recommend starting out with a handpicked bunch of maybe 5-10 sites first and expand from there

And of course if a site works really well, try contacting the owner directly to negotiate your own deal without the middle man.

Summary

Attention to detail and GOOD tracking will ensure profitable campaigns. Make sure you know what you’re paying for, cut shit that don’t work and keep the rest!

But all I’ve written here could be useless because Google will probably ban you anyways.

So my new site has been up and running for a while, ’slingin coloured contact lenses.

At the moment it’s just me and a few affiliate friends of mine promoting. Being in my position, I pretty much see the whole process from advertising to sale, and I’m seeing a few things that are a little worrying.

Since my site is very new, it has no decent SEO ranking, so all sales are generated by paid advertising. I’m using JROX affiliate software to track everything and I noticed some strange shit.

Basically a few sales came through and JROX didn’t assign any commissions to anyone. So I did some database digging to match the customer IP address to the affiliate who referred them, and I began to find more uncredited commissions. So I wrote a small script to check for pixel misfires so that affiliates could be credited their monies.

I’ve been in contact with JROX and everyone else along the line, but it seems that for mysterious reasons, maybe customers leave before ‘Thank You’ pages fully load or other things, but conversion pixels just don’t fire. Every time I test purchases myself, conversions track fine, but a small percentage go missing with real customers.

So what does this mean if you’re an affiliate?

Well, it probably means that if the advertiser isn’t checking for pixel misfires like I am, there’s a good chance a small percentage of your leads/sales aren’t being credited to you. Which ultimately could make or break a campaign.

Unfortunately this is out of your affiliate networks hands and in the hands of the advertiser themselves. If they blindly trust their programs to tell them when conversions are being made, they are most likely getting free conversions that they probably think are coming from search engines.