www.affiliateconfession.com

It’s completely insane what people put in their blog sidebar. Because I was trying to rack up a few Entrecard credits in the last several days and have started the massive advertising campaign, I’ve run across several blogs lately that are rather trashy looking. I’m sorry, I can only handle so many visual prompts on a web site or blog before I just click the little x in the top right corner and move on.

The trend is moving to less cluttered blogs, sidebars and somewhat less advertising as a whole and while there are exceptions, I’m seeing many less experienced affiliate marketers and bloggers stuffing their sidebar with every widget they can find. Not only does this irritate many readers because of the complete over stimulation and difficulty in finding links to recent articles (yes, real content), it also slows your blog down to a crawl. When readers have to wait 15 seconds for your scrollbars to become operational because all the frickin’ widgets have to load, they might be just like me and decide not to stick around.

How much information can any one human being absorb? Let’s take a look at one blog sidebar for an example. Now, I’m not going to name names here, but you might be able to figure it out if you are an Entrecard user and run across this one.

Starting with the right side bar moving down we have Translate This Page, Google Search, Spott Link Exchange, Entrecard widget, 12 blog directory badges, Blogroll Me, CBox widget, Blog Catalog widget, MyBlogLog widget and then as we cross over to the left side we move across Bidvertiser ads and come to a Technorati blog worth widget, a 160 x 600 Adsense tower, 2 RSS feed bookmarking widgets and finally 2 places to actually sign up for this blogs RSS feed.

That’s just too much stimulation and too many choices and it will have exactly the opposite effect the blog author is trying to create. But this is not one of the worst ones I have come across, there are many more with nearly twice as many widgets that can take up to 20 to 30 seconds to fully load on a good day. Others will add some sort of weather widget, ip address widget, current time widget (What is that one for? I have a watch, thanks), an Alexa widget, Yahoo Search Links widget, are you getting the picture, it just goes on and on.

Your sidebar is not a trash dump and I honestly don’t care who’s reading your blog or that Technorati says it is worth $50,000 which is a big fat lie, I want to see if you have some content worth reading, have a traffic generating trick I don’t know about or have a twist on some human interest story no one else has though of.

Please, take the vacuum cleaner to your sidebar, throw up 6 or so 125 x 125 ads that may interest me and let your content speak for itself. I just might be your second rss subscriber.

Alan

Watch out, here comes the hurricane Katrina of Entrecard advertising. I’ve managed to accumulate 8,000 Entrecard credits by dropping like a madman for the last few days and from mainly buying Entrecard credits on eBay. Yes, there are now a handful of individuals auctioning off their excess of credits.

Earning Entrecard credits is monotonous work and the most credits I’ve been able to accumulate at any one time has been around 2,500 because I won 750, earned 200 for writing a recommendation and I think I had a large amount refunded after someone removed the Entrecard widget from their blog. The rest were either from cards dropped on my blog, credits earned for people advertising and of course my own drops. But now with more than 8,000 credits, I’m going to be buying up Entrecard real estate faster than Donald Trump builds condos and fires people.

The whole point of the experiment is to get as much traffic as I can through their advertising system and see if my time is being well spent using Entrecard. Some time back when I had 2,500 credits I bought 30 or 40 ads and was fairly disappointed with the results, even though I was very selective in purchasing ads. I’m going to be even more selective now, using what I learned from the last experiment or rather, advertising push.

Entrecard has brought me quite a bit of traffic and without doing a full analysis of that traffic, I do believe some of it has converted into rss readers and at the very least, has branded Affiliate Confession somewhat in the blogosphere. However, there are some rather huge drawbacks to the whole Entrecard system. Number one is, it consumes way too much time. Unless you buy credits like I have done, earning them by dropping cards is not an efficient use of my time. The problem stems from seriously overpriced ad rates on some blogs. There are now 3 blogs that cost 500 or more credits to advertise on for a single day, and one of those blogs has a grayed out page rank. (It seems like the whole Entrecard advertising economy would be much better for advertisers if the individual ads stayed on a blog for 48 hours, instead of the current 24 hours.)

Even though I would never advertise on any of those blogs, other blogs in my niche are getting overpriced as well and getting beyond my affordability with the amount of Entrecard dropping I do, or in reality, have time for.

Lets get back to the mad advertising campaign. My goal is to advertise on a total of 100 to 150 blogs and spend every last credit by the end of this week. You normally don’t see any wait times for advertising on someones blog longer than 10 days so the ads should all be finished running 10 days or so from the end of this week. The criteria for picking advertisers will be as follows, their Entrecard widget must be within 2 sidebar clicks of the fold of the page, the blog must have a page rank, they must have backlinks as viewable in Google and they must have at least 100 rss readers. If their rss readers aren’t viewable, then I’ll give higher priority to their backlinks.

The campaign will be a success if I get a 50% increase in traffic and get 75 new rss readers. As of today I have 151 rss readers and average 165 unique visitors per day. I will evaluate the traffic at the end of the experiment, but the goal is to have 226 rss readers and have roughly 250 uniques per day by the cut off date of let’s say, March 10th. If that doesn’t happen, I probably won’t be spending much time dropping cards and participating in the Entrecard economy. I won’t remove the widget, but I won’t be wasting time with it any longer. The goal is not to stop using Entrecard, it is to hopefully see the possibility of it, so look for the Affiliate Confession 125 x 125 banner everywhere.

Alan

Congratulations goes out to Erik Karey of Erik Karey: Internet Entrepreneur for winning the latest blog contest, a one month supply of Nubody Organic Health vitamins. Erik also wins a free blog review from Bloggeries Blog Reviews. I’ve sent Erik an email and all he has to do now is respond back with his mailing address and I’ll ship out the vitamins.

NuBody Supplements offers 100% all natural, organic vitamins and herbal supplements made in the USA and they also offer a nice affiliate program that would be a great addition to a healthy living, fitness and exercise, or of course a vitamins or supplements type web site. You can earn 35% on every sale and monthly recurring income for your customers who sign up on a monthly auto-ship delivery plan. Not many companies offer a residual income on their products. You can also earn 5% on any affiliates that sign up under you making this a possible way to earn some very good money.

If you are interested, you can sign up for the NuBody Affiliate Program here, or you can read the full review on their organic supplements.

Thanks to everyone for entering the contest and stay tuned for another contest when my new blog theme gets implemented in approximately one more week.

And congratulations again to Erik!

Alan

I was due to start my Build A Niche Store series last week awaiting the arrival of BANS v3.0, but because of a few minor quirks and feature issues discovered in beta testing, the latest upgrade has been slightly delayed. I’m thankful that beta testing revealed what needed to be fix rather than letting it be discovered by the end user.

An email was sent out at the end 0f January to all BANS users letting us know that the release of version had been delayed and that they we considering adding a few features not previously mentioned in upgrade announcements. And as I was putting together this post, another email went out to BANS users letting us know that version 3.0 should be out either the very end of this week or the last week in February.

The biggest changes for this new version of the eBay affiliate niche store script is that all urls will be redirected through your site rather than go directly to eBay, thus improving your site’s seo and additional countries will be added to BANS so you can now build a store for any of the 14 or 15 countries represented by the eBay affiliate program. A couple of other significant changes I don’t think I’ve mentioned before are that the admin panel will get a work-over and some advanced templates will be added to the existing 9 that already come with the script.

Since I promised a 5 part tutorial on setting up a BANS store and getting traffic and incoming links and haven’t been able to deliver on that yet, I’ve found a couple of very comprehensive tutorial sites for you to peruse and get a good feel for setting up your own Build A Niche Store. Check them out below:

Watch Me Build A Bans Niche Site From Scratch - The title says it all. John Pratt gives very detailed info in this series on how he’s putting together his BANS site.

Build A Niche Store Empire In 12 Weeks- This is an amazing series and site for BANS users. Mark Hansen makes approximately $2,000 per month just from his BANS sites and he covers the gamut on putting together your site from researching your niche to advanced php mods. Some of these tricks are for more advanced users, so make sure you know what you’re doing before you start tweaking your php code.

Many BANS users are excited about this new version coming out and I am as well. One of my goals for this year was to put up an additional 10 stores and I’ve already put up 2 and the next 8 are just around the corner. It’s time to build an eBay affiliate empire.

Stay tuned for the BANS update.

Alan

The look and feel of Affiliate Confession will be changing in about another week or so. I’ve received preliminary concepts back from the designer I’m working with and they look absolutely great. Changes I sent back should get to me some time this weekend and then the coding phase will begin. I’m extremely excited to get this new custom Wordpress theme implemented and think it will benefit both myself and the readers of Affiliate Confession. That would be you guys.

The new theme has a lighter to dark blue color scheme with muted yellow and orange touches and the concept fits perfectly with what Affiliate Confession is all about, the confessing of my adventures in affiliate marketing and discussing the victories and hardships you may encounter while trying to make money online. Also, the most important posts will be added at the top along with the most commented posts being moved from the bottom of the blog to the top. That way new readers will have better access to the most important discussions and information here.

One other thing that will be changing, or rather added, is I will start to review more individual affiliate programs that may appeal to you or are very cool and deserve a good look at. First up sometime next week is a telescope affiliate program I found through Pepperjam Network that would be great for anyone with a science or educational based web site or even an outdoors, hunting or camping based web site since they also offer spotting scopes and binoculars. Hey, it looks like I’m starting the review already.

Anyway, stay tuned for the new design. I’m hoping to get the new theme installed and everything in place by the 24th or 25th of February, just a little over a week from now. I have had a few questions on who is designing the new theme and I will let you know when the design is finished and installed.

I’m trying to think up a contest to introduce the new theme. I’ll let you know when I come up with something or you can leave a suggestion for a contest in a comment.

Alan