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Today I am interviewing Kirsty McCubbin from AffiliateStuff.co.uk. Kirsty is an affiliate marketer who hails from Scotland but now lives in Australia and works as a full time Affiliate marketer.
Kirsty is a fantastic example of what it means to be an affiliate marketer; she is dedicated to he affiliate sites and is always looking for ways to get better traffic and make her sites better. I have recently worked a lot with her after some negative side effects from the “Panda” update and it is always inspiring to see her positive attitude and her ability to bounce back from inevitable downswings that all affiliates must face.
She makes here money from a selection of different affiliate sites and also runs her own affiliate tips website, which should be required reading for anyone hoping to make money from affiliate marketing. I have learned a lot from her and my hope is that you can learn something too and get some inspiration for your own affiliate websites.
When you started out, what was your SEO strategy;
And did you spend money on SEO?
With Lingerie Brands it was at least 2 years before I began to use any kind of SEO company. I was an SEO and PPC consultant before I became an affiliate so I do / did have a good knowledge of how to structure sites well and effectively target “easy wins” on the keyword front.
Other than that I used my affiliate world contacts to get a handful of links, but in reality if you’re prepared to put a lot of effort into volume of content combined with well structured landing pages to make the most of the traffic you do get, you don’t need much link love to actually get things started.
What do you think is the biggest barrier to success for newbies?
I think being prepared to keep pushing at building a large content site and putting out a good volume of content consistently is a huge key to getting things off the ground. Once your site gets to a certain size it seems to take on a life of it’s own and some of the generic things you can rank for are quite surprising.
I see lots of affiliate sites that had bags of potential and the person who started it just got bored and went away. I think a lot of people fail due to lack of determination. There’s a lot of uncertainty that needs pushing through.
What strategy would you use if you started again now?
If I were to start a new site now I’d probably do similar. Get a few inbounds from friends, chase a few industry specific links from directories, and try to put some linkbait out there.
Also, if I chose the right niche area it’d be relatively easy to get quality links. Some areas have a good sense of community and it’s easy to get links from bloggers.
A good example of this is my mens underwear site which I have never paid any SEO money for. It has links from underwear brands, key bloggers, and even some nice “surprise” links from places like cracked.com thanks to the more unusual nature of some of the mens underwear styles I feature.
How much did you invest in your first site before making a return?
I started Lingerie Brands with an initial investment of £100 on domain, hosting, and some premium WordPress themes and plugins and it was making around £3,000 a month by the time I paid for any SEO.
How many visitors does lingerie brands actually get each month?
At it’s height it brought in around 60,000 visits per month – last month it brought in just shy of 9,000 thanks to a combination of the Panda update and those pesky scrapers who nabbed my content. Hey ho, that’s affiliate marketing for you though. I’ll probably have it back to around 20k to 25k (more with a good following internet wind) in 6 months time and the site will be better for it.
A large part of affiliate marketing success is to not let the setbacks put you off – setbacks come with the territory, LOL.
You spoke about building a large volume of content;
How do you control the quality?
That was a major weakness with Lingerie Brands and it’s not a mistake I intend to make again. Since Google’s “Panda” update I’ve been through that site about 6 or 7 times altering the brand pages. The rankings for those pages are now better than they have been in about 18 months and that was something I lost sight of thanks to the sheer size of the site… Does make you think.
What’s your view now on building a big site Vs maintaining quality?
I think it is still possible to add lots of content and monitor things like page bounce rates and be able to go back and change page structure en-masse. I use set templates to put my blog post type content into, I’ve been monitoring bounce rates on those (still not great but getting there) and tinkering about with the structure.
Once I have something that works I’ll go into the WordPress database and do a search and replace on the code to apply that template to all the content. Same thing for future changes. I’ll probably also pay individual attention to any that turn out to be good traffic generators (there’s always a surprise or two!)
However, en masse editing strategies aside I think I’ll employ a strategy of having more key content pages / in depth overviews designed to pick up generic terms such as “see through underwear” etc. I had such pages previously and they did well so I’ll go back through analytics and find the “easy wins” but do a really thorough job this time and really individualise those pages. I think that’s how I will strike the balance this time around.
What’s your SEO & link building strategy going forward?
I think the formula is probably a lot more complex than links. Not only do you need to get lots of links but you need to be engaging in social media in it’s many forms. I’m having lots of luck getting large brands to retweet my posts on Twitter at the moment which I think will help. I’m also doing all sorts of submissions to things like stumbleupon, using Facebook, engaging with bloggers etc and I suspect there’s still a lot for me to learn in this area.
I think you need to give off a massive array of signals moving forward. Some may not be terribly important right now but I’ve decided to do all of them before they become vital in some way – it’s a very complex but interesting learning process.
I think you can still get good momentum even with a relatively one dimensional approach, I know there are still a lot of people with standard blog type structures to their sites who don’t do a lot of link building and are getting good traffic. However I don’t think a one dimensional approach is that wise any more.
I think it’s important not only to have an affiliate site but also an information resource. This balance is bloody hard to strike when you are as monetisation minded as us affiliates. However, I’m now adopting an approach where 2 out of 5 blog posts that go on my site are non monetised / newsy in nature.
How do you keep your content informative / not too “affiliatey”?
I think it’s important not to have the body of a page 100% occupied by affiliate links (masked or otherwise). If I were Google I’d be working on percentages and placement. Therefore even on my monetised pages there might be say 5 links throughout the body a page. Only one of those will be an affiliate link leaving the site, and it won’t necessarily be at the top of the page, but it’ll be cunningly structured to be the one people can’t help but click on. The rest will either be links to internal resources of relevance to the page content or links to other relevant sites.
I think this has a strong role to play in catching those long tail phrases. Don’t ask me for scientific evidence but I have a site that lost a bit of longtail, and a friend of mine had a site structured very similarly. The key difference between the two was the above – which made a whole heap of sense to me in light of the research I have done on all this Panda jiggery pokery.
I’ve been using this strategy on lingerie brands for about a month now. My traffic has increased by 30% in the last few days. If that momentum persists I’ll hit 12,500 visits this month. Still small but from 7,500 in June I think that is an encouraging result. It’s just common sense really – you have to try to think like Google would about your content.
So how many affiliate sites do you actually have?
I have 3 main sites and then another 4 or 5 that bring in dribs and drabs which I don’t really maintain terribly well other than a periodic tidy up. There is one got a healthy traffic boost off the last Panda update and sales are on the up so I suspect time will be devoted to that one very soon!
Oddly enough my mens underwear site got a traffic boost after losing 40% Google traffic in the last update – and I hadn’t really done a thing to it that was significant?!