Monthly Round-Up: February 2010
February was a poor month for me and I only made about 300 pounds and I had to spend about 80 quid on AdWords to get there. This was my worst month for probably about six months and the first real big drop in profit. But onwards and upwards as they say.
I have started proper work on a ‘big site’ but am only focusing on one type of product for now and will then start adding in more products once I am ranking ok for the first product type.
I’ve started paying for content and reinvesting some of my earnings from affiliate marketing now I am working full-time again. I’ve been buying content in lots of 500 words and having the content focused around my niche keywords. I had a site that had been at the bottom of page one in Google for ages and after adding the content it moved to number three in Google so hopefully I should see a return on that investment shortly. Before that the site was languishing on page two and sometimes further out but after moving it to WordPress and separating each product review/description into a separate Wordpress post it moved to the bottom of page one in Google. So moving to WordPress plus adding good written content can equal a decent jump in the serps for a site.
As for my big site I am having trouble finding a decent WordPress theme that is suited to an affiliate site. I’m using a magazine theme at the moment and I do like it but it doesn’t quite meet my needs and I am having trouble deciding how to structure a site that is bigger than my usual one type of product site.
Can anyone recommend a good WordPress theme, free or otherwise, for a decent sized affiliate site?
How was February for you?
I heard of one called “thesis” for wordpress. Apparently you can make it do anything you want, whatever that means :0
Thanks, I will have a look for it.
long time since i’ve been on your blog seamaster, sounds like at the very least you’re sticking with it which is great. I’ve severely cut down on the number of sites i’m working on focusing only on 3 main sites + 1 new partnership project, all are wordpress and all are organic SEO. I pulled in around £150- £200 in total which was about expected for my sites, my other project not related to affiliate marketing, however, took off and i made around £300-£400 + £1000 up for grabs if i close a deal. all in all its good, but still no where near as consistent or high as i need it to be to give up the day job.
Yea thesis has been recommended to me!
I use Thesis for one of my sites, and its certainly versatile – though colours and things are easy to change via CSS the layout is harder. As this is controlled mainly by the options page, if you want to make any larger changes you need to get stuck into the php/CSS as with any other theme. However because its setup to read from these options pages this can be a pain!
As to my February it was my second month…and too poor to mention I think!!
Have a search for a theme called ‘threat to creativity’
I don’t think it is great as standard but the front navigation is fantastic and would look great with the categories displayed on the front page, the background as a black and white image changing to a colour image on mouseover. It pretty much does it all as standard but could do with a few tweaks.
Thanks Ian. It does look interesting. So are all those boxes on the front links to categories? If so that looks pretty much like what I was after.
But would the home page get ranked well if it was just category excerpts?
No, at the moment they are posts which are listed.
You would need to go into the code, probably index.php and change something like
to something like
It is actually quite easy to make changes like that, just playing about with the source code + there are loads of places to get help with wordpress coding.
The great thing is, once it’s sorted you have a ready-made template for any future sites.
You would also need to add some text to the homepage to get it to rank. This isn’t too difficult but without looking at the code I couldn’t tell you how to do this.
to something like:
FAIL
It really depends what you want a theme to do. I use the Studio Press themes. They are well written, optimised for seo and extremely easy to manipulate. Those, together with Price Tapestry, enable me to do just about whatever I want.
Give me a shout if you want some examples of my sites, or let me know what you are trying to do.