AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

Archive for the ‘Ask Us a Question’ Category

Some of you may know by know but Chris and I recently purchased ukoffer.com from Kieron. The site is a very nice complement to CompareStorePrices and gives us the ability to expand into new sectors. It is to be run as a separate business along with our answerhero.co.uk range of sites.

Currently, we are working out what to do with it, our overall intention is keep it as a “latest offers” and voucher site. Our plans are likely to involve extending the categories and encouraging greater consumer participation in some way. Time will tell. Meantime we have our hands pretty full adding new pages for relevant offers.

If you have any interesting ideas on working with us on the site, please contact me directly: nigel “at” cspmail.co.uk

We have the ongoing and ever increasing challenge on Answerhero.co.uk (and also on any other country variation we launch) of getting decent answers posted amoungst the general answers we get. Many of the UGC answers are quite good but we felt we needed to set up a small network of people who would be prepared to devote time and energy in answering for us.

There are a few ways to go about getting paid content as you may be aware of. The simplest way, and by far the least cost effective is to pay a content firm to write on the site. This would not be the way forward for us, just to recap why; the whole basis of creating AnswerHero is to try to build and run a site in various countries, from the ground up with minimal investment and make it work so that other webmasters can follow our successes and failures and generally enjoy the journey with us.

So back to getting content…. paid is out, so we figured why don’t we use an incentive scheme which pays vouchers? We use this on our main site, CompareStorePrices.co.uk and it works really well so we started the process of migrating people to answer on AH.

The way our getting paid to work at home system works is listed on Answerhero – become an AnswerSuperHero page and also below. It effectvely works out that we pay a tiny fraction for the content from what we would if it was normal paid. You generally pay between 5p and 12p per word for content. On our scheme we end up paying somewhere like 0.7 of a penny per word!

Also our AnswerSuperHeros can work any hours that suit them and do as much or as little as they want.

We fully envision that we will end up with a small army in each country, providing the ad revenue will pay the costs then we can extend it quite a lot.

AnswerHero Rules

New podcast uploaded where I have reviewed 2 websites that I was asked to review on the A4U Forum.

If you have a website that you would like reviewed then send me a message on Twitter – @ChrisYoungUK or post a reply to this post on the A4UForum: SEO – Ask a Super Affiliate.

You can get this from iTunes or listen to any of our podcasts from here:

• On Page SEO Site Reviews (June 2009)
• Affiliate Marketing Questions and Answers (June 2009)
• The Basics of SEO (June 2009)
• Long Tail Keywords (May 2009)

I put a post over on the A4UForum entitled “SEO and traffic building – ask a Super Affiliate” as we really want to help new affiliates avoid a lot of the time-consuming mistakes we made when starting out in Affiliate Marketing.

Here are the first few questions to be asked and the answers. We will also include these in our next Podcast.

From “realfun”

An explaination or experience on how a large site can get traffic with just a couple of links compared to many links and the importance of link building

I have years of experience on this one and when I look back I can’t believe how much time I wasted trying to get as many links as possible!

I did all of these and more:

• Manually searching for complimentary sites and contacting the webmaster
• Searching for directories and adding my link
• Paying to be listed in directories
• Asking for link exchanges in affiliate forums
• Joining forums and then trying to be helpful just so I could get a link in one of my posts or the signature
• Using dodgy link farms
• Linking all my sites together

I could go on!

I wish I knew then what I know now – DON’T DO ANY OF IT!

The whole point of creating this blog was to show people how to create a successful affiliate site by showing you everything we do and telling you what works and what doesn’t.

Now it’s early days (we only launched the site a few weeks ago) and the main site doesn’t have much content yet but the blog is ranking well and that in turn is causing pages from the main site to rank too so we are getting some traffic already and I haven’t done any link building!.
All I have done is to update my profile on the A4Uforum to include this blog and that’s it!

We don’t plan to do any link building at all. That time should be spent on adding more content that people will want to link to anyway. Our plan is for all content to be generated by our users by incentivising them to answer questions. More on this as we progress with the project.

From “MicroHunter”

Hi Chris,

This sounds interesting and is certainly very generous.

Why not start right at the beginning with advice for a new affiliate thinking about building some sort of content site and using SEO to generate traffic.

Some ideas about the first things to think about:

* Hosting options (how does the physical location of your server affect SEO performance? Are there hosting companies there are especially suitable for affiliates?)

* I think keyword-rich domains has probably been done to death.

* The latest thinking on link-cloaking, or on ways to stop Google viewing your site as a thin affiliate would be useful.

* Top 10 techniques to drive PageRank is old favourite but still useful.

Affiliate Hosting Options

My suggestion here would be to start with a feature rich shared hosting company which will allow you to find your feet and experiment with your site without spending too much money.

I don’t have a lot of experience in this area as it is over 5 years since CompareStorePrices was on a shared host but it certainly worked well for the first few months until they complained that we were overloading the server with traffic!

I am trying out FastHosts at the moment for a friend who wanted to get a blog and website going. It’s too early to tell how good they are but in terms of features they seem pretty good. You can buy a .com domain from them with hosting and get the .co.uk free. You can choose from Windows or Unix and there are a ton of options that you can add to your account at any time.
Best of all you can be live in minutes!

Once we have used them for a while I will let you know what we think but if anyone else has any experience of hosting companies then please post a comment here.

In terms of location I would always recommend that you find a host in the country that you are trying to target. So if you were going for the US market then I wouldn’t use Fasthosts or any other UK hosting company. Why? – because Google looks at the IP address of sites and will give more “weight” to sites that are hosted in the same country as the domain.

Keyword Rich Domains

Yes this one has been “done to death” but probably worth a recap.

Try to find a short domain that includes the main theme of your site but don’t go for a long, hyphenated domain which includes all the keywords you are trying to target.

For example if you were creating a site on collecting stamps go for something like “TheStampExpert.co.uk” rather than “collecting-stamps-philately-uk.co.uk”.
If you are not convinced do some searches on Google and see how many keyword stuffed domains come up.

Link Cloaking

The Google engineers are not stupid unfortunately and there is a good chance that they can determine that a link from your site goes through an affiliate network even if you try and hide the fact.
The main benefit of having a “cloaked” link is to make the site look more professional.

When a user hovers over a link it looks much better to have something like “http://www.mysite.co.uk/leave.asp?id=1234567″ than an affiliate link.

So one way to achieve this is to create a page like “leave.asp” which does a lookup on a database and then redirects through the relevant affiliate network. This also has the added benefit of making it easier to change the links if a merchant changes networks – you just update the database.

Warning Some merchants use URL encoding on their links and using things like server redirects can cause problems. Just make sure you test each new merchant as you add them.

Thin Affiliate

If you think your site could be deemed to be a “thin affiliate” site then it probably is! Actually I think we should rename this to the “lazy affiliate” site.

I have to make some assumptions here but I assume you are talking about the plethora of shopping directory affiliate sites out there that add no value to the user.
If you want to create a long term business then forget about the “easy route” and create something worthwhile.

At this point I need to repeat my mantra:

Go for a niche and add unique content, more unique content and then even more unique content

If you are not very good at writing then either pay someone else to do it or offer someone a profit share.

Top 10 techniques to drive PageRank

That’s easy:

1. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
2. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
3. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
4. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
5. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
6. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
7. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
8. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
9. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content
10. Forget about Page Rank and concentrate on adding unique content

Just to put some meat on that one – CompareStorePrices’ homepage PageRank has jumped around from about 7 to 4 and it has never made any difference to it’s ranking in Google (for “Compare Prices” or other related keywords) nor has it resulted in a noticeable difference in traffic.

From “Max99″

Own the .co.uk for a nice term, its sitting 4th after around 2/3 months. The term is pretty competitive, I believe i’ve got the on site SEO done, off site im not great at.

Any advice on how to jump up 3 places ?

My initial reaction to this one was to say “forget about it and concentrate on adding more pages of complimentary content” but the key thing here is “The term is pretty competitive”.

How much traffic are you getting to that page now? If you are getting say 5000 visitors a month then a jump to position 1 could have quite an impact but if you are getting less than a 1000 then I’m not sure you would see that much difference in terms of revenue so I’d forget about it.

So how do you get the site to position 1?

• Firstly make sure every page on your site links back to the home page
• Keep adding more, complimentary content and link back to the home page from within the body of that content using different variations of the keywords you are trying to rank for
• Offer to write some content for other, complimentary sites which includes a link back to your homepage with different variations of the keywords you are trying to rank for
• Keep changing the content on the home page. For example provide the latest news relating to the subject you are targeting
• Create an RSS feed of the latest content and submit that to Google FeedBurner and other RSS directories

That’s all for now.

If you would like your questions answered during our next Q&A session then please post a comment here or on the post on the A4uForum.

We want to make this Affiliate Website creation journey as interactive as possible so feel free to ask us anything you like by replying to this post and we will try and answer as many questions as we can.