I am slowly recovering from a long weekend of work for my full-time job. Slowly I am picking up momentum again and have been able to push some great content to several websites. I am reviewing products and publish those reviews with matching affiliate links. I am doing pretty good in my opinion as I have been able to update several websites with at least one article per day now. Fresh content is usually working out pretty good as search engines love new content. So, I hope to see a fair ROI on these efforts in the weeks and months to come. I still need to find time promote these new pages – either with some SEO or via PPC. For now the goal is to get the content out and indexed. The remaining pieces I am not too worried about at the moment.

I also bought two domain names that seem to get natural type in traffic from what I can tell. I will need to find a good content writer who can dive into the topic and provide me with ~20 on topic articles per domain. In the past I have used different folks for that, but with mixed results. The overall quality of work I am getting through forum members at Digitalpoint.com has gone down the drain. It’s now the 3rd time that I have to start a PayPal dispute to either get my money back or the work done I paid for. Very frustrating. This did not happen once 12 months ago and I think DP is going downhill fast. Time to find another webmaster forum that is not so over-saturated and where members still try to provide value. DP feels different nowadays. The majority of the members seems to have 60 postings or less and are coming from India or Pakistan – I am not a racist – I rather want to point out the difference in mentality compared to when the majority of folks seemed to be from the US/Canada/Australia/UK. The moderation has also changed. I see several long time members being banned. And a few weeks ago I received a warning from a moderator for something I still don’t understand. Anyone of some other good webmaster related forums that cover a large variety of topics. I know Sitepoint.com and maybe one or two others, but ….

I am happy to see my affiliate marketing efforts slowly getting grip. My stats over at CJ.com are improving and I am very happy with the initial results. It seems like I am slowly moving up from a random conversion to getting more commissions more often. The other good thing is that it is spreading out between different merchants as well which I consider good. It is still a long way to go for me though. I accepted the “hit” when signing up for CJ’s data feeds which set me back $200.00 (one-time fee though) and I am happy to have that already absorbed and to actually see a positive balance in my account. Only a small fraction of my CJ earnings are coming from PPC traffic at the moment. For whatever reason I am getting a good grip on PPC traffic and CJ merchants. PPC traffic still works better for me with networks like Neverblueads or Copeac. From most networks I am using I currently like Neverblue Ads interface the most. For whatever reason I am not having much luck with my affiliate manager, but I have been too busy to follow through on that.

So, overall it is good to see the efforts I am putting paying off at least a little bit. Like I said, I still have long ways to go, but the results are motivating for me. In case you wonder – review type postings with text links have worked best for me in getting results in affiliate marketing. That is where I will spend additional time on this week.

Just a short update today. I had contacted Commission Junction due to a problem with their links. The DNS for my affiliate link domain (their cryptic domain) was down and so all my links went into nowhere. I noticed this late last Friday and it took until Sunday for the links to work again. No matter what I had opened a support ticket to inquire about it and received a response today. The response was the typical blabla you often get in such cases (due to heavy volume, engineers working immediately on the case, bla bla bla). This seems to be a generic problem with CJ. Anyway – the support person who had responded also mentioned that my links would be working and that he saw $xxx.xx commission made through those links. Well, my account is not showing this and so I replied back to the ticket. Seems like my last PPC campaign was more successful than I initially thought. Now I just hope this gets resolved fairly quickly as I am eager to continue with my marketing efforts. I had placed most campaigns on hold due to the domain links not working. Now I need to check out first which campaign delivered the positive results.

I am also adding more content to my latest website and I hope that soon the first natural se-traffic is coming in. The domain is new and so it will just require patience on my side. But – I am thinking long-term and so it is not a big deal.

Today I received an inquiry for a domain name that I am holding for almost 7 years now. I am not doing anything with the name at the moment. So, I am not sad about the inquiry and if the price is right I might just sell the domain name. It is a 3 letter dot info domain name registered by me shortly after the dot info registry was live for the public. I know that a dot info is by far not worth as much as a dot com, but even a 3 (good) letter dot info domain is pretty hard to get nowadays. We will see how that turns out.