AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

Archive for the ‘Traffic Generation Techniques’ Category

If you have a site which has a lot of new content added on a regular basis then adding an RSS feed is a great way to not only get more people to view your content but also a way to generate more inbound links.

I have just created 2 RSS feeds for AnswerHero.co.uk:

• Latest Questions
• Latest Answers

An RSS feed is an XML based file in a specific format that is recognised by the plethora of RSS readers out there.
You can even use services like TwitterFeed to automatically post entries from your RSS feed into Twitter accounts!

Setting up the feed is fairly straightforward and involves writing out a header section and then looping through the required records and writing them to the feed.

RSS Header Section

If you look at the source of one of the feeds above you will see that the header section looks like this:

Everything in this section is hard coded except the LastBuildDate which is basically the current date.

Firstly you need to add this to the very top of the code: Response.Contenttype = "text/xml".
Next output the sections above until you get to the “lastbuilddate”.

I used the following ASP code to format the date using “now”:

response.write ""
response.write left(weekdayname(weekday(now)),3) & ", " & day(now) & " " & left(monthname(month(now)),3) & " " & year(now) & " "
If Hour(now) < 10 then
response.write "0"
end if
response.write hour(now) & ":"'
If Minute(now) < 10 then
response.write "0"
end if
response.write minute(now) & ":"
If Second(now) < 10 then
response.write "0"
end if
response.write second(now) & " GMT"
response.write "" & vbcrlf
response.write "Copyright: (C) eneva.com Ltd." & vbcrlf
response.write ""
response.write ""
response.write "http://answerhero.co.uk/images/logo.png"
response.write " http://www.AnswerHero.co.uk"
response.write "" & vbcrlf


RSS Body Section

You then need to loop through as many records as you would like to go out in the feed, say 50, and write the following for each record:

response.write "" & vbcrlf
response.write "" & DESCRIPTION_FROM_RECORD & "" & vbcrlf
response.write " " & URL & "" & vbcrlf
vbcrlf
response.write " "
response.write left(weekdayname(weekday((mid(rs("DateTime"),7,2) & "/" & mid(rs("DateTime"),5,2) & "/" & left(rs("DateTime"),4)))),3) & ", "
response.write mid(rs("DateTime"),7,2) & " " & left(monthname(mid(rs("DateTime"),5,2)),3) & " " & left(rs("DateTime"),4) & " " & mid(rs("DateTime"),9,2) & ":" & mid(rs("DateTime"),11,2) & ":" & mid(rs("DateTime"),13,2) & " GMT"
response.write "" & vbcrlf
response.write ""
response.write "" & vbcrlf


RSS Footer

Then finish of the XML with the footer:

Allowing Auto Detection of the RSS Feeds

You know when you go to some websites you get the little RSS logo appearing in the browser?
Well you achieve this by placing entries in the head section of your pages.
If you look at the source of the AnswerHero home page you will see the following:

It’s as simple as that!

Once you have created your RSS feed just do a search on Google for “rss feed directory” and you will find plenty of places for you to publicise your shiny new feed.

OK after spending far too long searching for other people who mention “Affiliate Marketing” or similar and looking for real people who are not just spewing out other peoples blogs from an RSS feed I came across twitter.com/afftwitlist.

At the time of writing there were 1123 followers so I thought I would try an experiment – simply follow all of them and see how many follow back. As I see pointless Tweets coming through I will then just stop following those people.

I wouldn’t normally do something like this but as they should all be interesting in Affiliate Marketing I thought it was worth a try.

The @AnswerHeroBlog Twitter account currently has 55 followers and I will let you know what effect this has.

Update

As I went from page to page clicking on the “Follow” button it suddenly stopped working. What i had forgotten about is that there is a limit to the number of people you can follow in relation to the number of followers you have so I will now need to wait until a good number of the people I have followed are following us back or I have removed enough of the bad quality followers to allow me to continue adding more.

Here is the official Twitter explanation of Follow Limits:

I can’t follow people: follow limits

Submitted Nov 24, 2008 by crystal
Why did I hit a limit?

Last year, Twitter imposed reasonable limits to help prevent system and user abuse. (You can read more about that here.) If you hit a Twitter limit, we will tell you by showing an error message in your browser when you try to perform an action. If you’ve hit a limit, it means you’ve exceeded one of these limits:

* 1,000 updates per day
* 1,000 direct messages per day
* 100 API requests per hour
* Follow limit

We do not limit the number of people who can follow you, but we have put limits in place to stop people from aggressively following others. Everyone is allowed to follow 2000 people. After that, follow limits are based on the number of people who are following you. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter, and everyone is subject to follow limits, even high profile and API accounts

So Wolfram Alpha is now live; is it any good in terms of driving traffic to an affiliate marketing website such as AnswerHero.co.uk ?

What is Wolfram Alpha?

Let’s take a step back for those of you who don’t actually know what Wolfram Alpha is.

It’s a new type of “intelligent” informational search engine that, as is the norm with the media, has been hyped up as being the next “Google Killer”.

What it does however is completely different – it combines information from various sources to provide you with a detailed answer to your search.

So for example if you type in “Weather in London” you get detail graphs and statistics about everything from temperatures and cloud cover through to information about the actual weather station where the data was obtained from.

The Same Search in Google

Compare that to the simple graphical representation you get for the same query in Google:

Any Good for Affiliates?

Well my first impression is not that favourable as it seems to me to be far too scientific.

In terms of affiliate use it would need to be used by people who are looking for something you are trying to sell so I guess you could try and sell a weather station to people searching for the weather but as there’s no advertising (yet) that’s not going to be an option anyway.

“So what about product related information?” Well a search for “Canon Ixus 80” yields no results at all.

The biggest problem from a traffic generation point of view is that IT DOESN’T LIST ANY WEBSITES so that kind of puts that one to be – next!

Conclusion

As far as I am concerned it’s one of those websites you will forget all about unless you happen to use the kind of data that it produces on a regular basis. The results are too detailed for day-to-day use.

I guess if they started to provide product information in a standard format then it could become quite valuable for product comparison but who knows if it will go in that direction?

One of 2 things will happen – it will be bought by Google and will be integrated into their results as a “more detailed results” link or it will become a niche website.

Now we just have to wait for the Next Google Killer!!!

I was just made aware of an app that you can get for your iPhone called Tweetmic that allows you to record audio on your iPhone and instantly upload it and post a Tweet linking to the audio file.

So this got me thinking – what a fantastic way to record Podcasts. Basically wherever I am I can simply whip out my iPhone and start recording. The quality is surprisingly good and is more than adequate for Podcasting.

So I downloaded the app from the App Store and installed it, followed the instructions and answered a question from Fraser Edwards which he asked me on Twitter.

The question was:

fraseredwards@ChrisYoungUK what made you come back out of ‘retirement’ after taking it easy for a few years?

and here is my TweetMic response: http://tweetmic.com/p/or8×6d677v6.

So all I now need to do is get that audio recording into an audio file on my PC so I can convert it to MP3 and upload to the server as a Podcast.

I had a look around and found a free, open source app called Audacity which looked like it would do the job so I downloaded and installed that.

Using Audacity to Convert my Tweetmic Audio File to MP3

My Sound Card does not allow direct WAV output so I used a double ended mic cable to send the headphone directly to the mic input on the computer.

Next I loaded up Audacity and went to the page with the audio recording on Tweetmic and started playing it.

The next step was to make sure that the recording volume was correct and did not cause any distortion or background noise. Audacity is great for this as it shows you a wave form of the audio as it is being recorded. I found that setting the computer’s volume to 50% and the Audacity Input Volume to 0.5 worked best for me. In future it should now be a case of just making sure the computer volume is set to 50% as Audacity remembers the last settings.

So now I just created a new Audacity project, started the recording and then started the Tweetmic record immediately afterwards. Once complete click on the brown “stop” button and we are ready to export to MP3 for uploading to the server.

If you need to do any editing of the audio then Audacity has a whole host of options but I haven’t used any yet so I can’t tell you about them!

So I just selected the “File > Export” option which presents a screen where you can fill out a ton of information about the audio file. I ignored all that and clicked “OK”.
You can then choose “MP3 Files” as the “Save as type” and choose the directory and give the file a name and Save it.

The first time I did this a dialogue box appeared stating that a .dll file is required:

Just click on the Download button and follow the instructions then try the export again.

You now have an MP3 version of the audio file ready to upload and include in the Podcast XML!

As you use Twitter you see automatic posts from people that have used third party Twitter services such as directories or groups, etc.

After following a few people with SEO interested I noticed the following Tweet from one of them:

I just joined the SEO Twitter Group http://tgr.me/g/seosem so stop by and see us. #seosem

So I clicked on the link and signed up with the SEOSEM group at TwitterGroups.

I then had a browse through the directory and signed up with all of these too:

• affiliates
• affiliatemarketing
• Web Developers

Not sure if there is a way of telling if people now find the @AnswerHeroBlog profile via this or not but if there is I will be sure to tell you all!

So as well as trying to get users to visit the main AnswerHero.co.uk site we obviously want as many people as possible following this blog.

I have been using Twitter for a few months and whilst I was extremely sceptical at the beginning (as I think everyone is) I can now see the huge potential Twitter has as a very targeted way of getting traffic to a website.

So I have just created a new Twitter profile called AnswerHeroBlog.

Now what I don’t want to do is have to spend a lot of extra time manually posting to this new Twitter account so I am going to use a service called TwitterFeed to automatically post links to any new blog entry that appears on the AnswerHero Blog. More on setting this up later.

There are 2 stages to getting a Twitter Account working: Getting “Relevant” Followers and Posting Tweets (the short posts you make on Twitter) but to be honest they go hand-in-hand:

Getting Relevant Twitter Followers

The key is making sure you attract the correct type of follower. Quite simply you do this in 3 ways:

One Line Bio

Include keywords in the Twitter profile “One Line Bio” that reflect the type of people you are trying to target. This is your “Call To Action” and should convince the reader that they want to follow you.

I am using:

A new Online Marketing Concept – we show you how to use SEO, Social media, Email Marketing, Podcasts, YouTube, etc. to create a new MONEY MAKING website

As you can see the Bio includes the key phrases: “Online Marketing”,”SEO”,”Social Media”,”Email Marketing”,”Podcasts”,”YouTube”,”MONEY MAKING website”.

Use #tags

If you put a # in front of a keyword within a Tweet then people searching for that keyword will see your post. This is very time sensitive. For example I just put a Tweet on the new account which said this:

Welcome! We will be posting real-time updates on our MONEY MAKING website creation journey starting today! #SEO #MAKEMONEY #MARKETING

Within minutes we had 4 new followers who probably did a search on one of these #tags and saw us listed towards the top of the search results. After a few minutes my tweet will have been replaced by more up-to-date tweets which include the same keyword. The tweet may still be found when people search using other words as well as the individual #tag and this goes back to the Long Tail theory. At the end of the day the Twitter search is very similar to the Google Search except it just searches Tweets so the same concepts hold true.

So as you can see this is a very powerful way to target users who are interested in your chosen subject.

Follow Other Relevant People

You should also dedicate a little time each week to finding other people in your industry and follow them. That way when other people look at the list of people that are following that person they will see you in the list and may then choose to follow you too.

From my experience of my first Twitter account we should see a snowball effect – as we post more Tweets, get more followers and follow more people so the number of people following us should start to accelerate.

As usual I will keep you updated on the number of followers in the Results category or you can just take a look at the Twitter account.

If you have used the XML format defined by Apple then adding a podcast to the iTunes Store should be straightforward.

The only slight problem was that initially I couldn’t find the link to add the podcast as the iTunes Instructions state that the link is on the left of the screen but it’s not any more, it’s on the right under “FOR PODCASTERS”:

Next I posted the XML file location into the box:

The following screen is then presented:

iTunes Review Podcast

A quick click of the Submit button and it’s done!

The final screen states that the Podcast will not appear in the iTunes Store immediately and may get reviewed.

One of the areas of affiliate marketing that we were keen to get involved with was the growing popularity of online video.

Now back when I started CompareStorePrices.co.uk there was no such thing as online video but since then it has really exploded and this year is seen by many as the year online video comes of age.

Creating a video for posting on YouTube is a great way to get your message out there and is a fairly straightforward and inexpensive process and I am going to walk you through the steps I took to create and upload the following video:

How to Create a YouTube Compatible Video

If you have a digital camera with video capability then you are all set. For better quality you may want to use a camcorder but for YouTube the quality from a reasonably modern digital camera is sufficient.
There are even cameras and camcorders available now that automatically upload the video directly to your YouTube account but I would not recommend using these as you will want to add some titles to the video before uploading it (more on this later).

So basically go ahead and record the video and transfer it onto your computer. I used a Canon Digital Ixus 75 and recorded the video directly to the memory card. I then popped the memory card into the computer.

Editing the Video with Windows Movie Maker

Windows Vista comes with a video editing package included which is adequate for our needs so this is what I used:

- Start up Windows Movie Maker and select a new project.
- Use “Import Videos” to pull your newly created video into the project.

Now if you want to cut any dodgy bits out of the video, such as the part where you didn’t realise that your wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend/dog was on the phone in the background slagging off your best mate, you can slice and dice it to your hearts content using the video preview box on the right hand side. Just play the video up to the point you want to split it and click on the “Split” button. Hey presto your video will be sliced down the middle like a scene from an 80’s horror movie.
You can then discard the leftovers and you will be left with a lovely masterpiece all ready for unleashing on the world.

Next drag the video into the Timeline at the bottom of the screen.

Adding Titles and an Overlay

You’ll want to make the video look all Steven Spielberg now so you can add a title at the beginning and an overlay to advertise the website URL.

Click on the “Titles and Credits” option in the left menu under “Edit” and you will be taken to the titles screen.

Creating and formatting the titles is pretty self explanatory so I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs so let’s assume you have created your “title at the beginning” and added that to the timeline.

Next create an overlay title which shows the website by selecting “title on the selected clip”
Have a play around with the different fonts and transition effects and try adding a few carriage returns before the title so you can see how it changes in the video preview on the right.

Once you are happy click “Add Title” and you will see the title appear in the timeline.
At this point you can drag the title left and right so it appears at the required point in the video. You can also increase the length of time that the title appears by stretching the title box and you can also create a copy of the title by right clicking on it and pasting it elsewhere.
For my example above I place 1 overlay title at the beginning and one at the end.
That way the user will see the title appear twice which should help draw their eye to it.

Creating the Video File

Not much left to do.
Click on “This Computer” under the “Publish” menu option and the video will be generated into a file on your computer.

Uploading the Video to YouTube

If you haven’t already got one then create yourself a YouTube account which should ideally have the same name as the website you are creating. We created a new YouTube account called “AnswerHeroBlog” and used that.

Sign in and click the “Upload” button (top right), select the video file (make sure you select the one you just created and not the original from the camera as I did to start with!) and the video will start uploading.
Whilst the upload is taking place you can fill out the required information. Make sure you mention the website and add as many relevant keywords and tags as you can but don’t make it look spammy.

That’s it – job done – you are now a global super star!

OK I’m ready to start the boring task of submitting to other websites now so I Googled “Podcast Directories” and started to work my way through all the websites that appeared.
I’m going to have to do this in batches so I’ll keep updating this post as I go.

Here are the submit feed pages for the websites that I submitted the XML to:

• Podanza
• Podcast Blaster
• iTunesTracks (you need to select the relevant category to submit to)
• Replay Video
• Vicasting
• Genwi (register first)
• Pod Lounge
• Podcast Pup
• Fluctu8
• 2rss (bottom of page)
• Podcast Like That
• Britcaster (register and confirm email)
• Digital Podcast (registration required)
• The Education Podcast Network
• Feeds4All
• Get a Podcast (requires more than 1 podcast before submitting)
• GigaDial (registration required)
• iBizRadio

So I have created my first YouTube video for the AnswerHero blog but how can we maximise the exposure that this video will get?

Obviously we need to make sure that the video has been uploaded to as many video sharing websites as possible but that’s a bit of a time consuming and monotonous task that I don’t fancy doing right now and one of the great things about working for yourself is you don’t have to do the boring stuff if you don’t want to!

As a big fan of Podcasts it makes sense to use the audio from the videos I have created to generate a podcast and make this available not only on the blog but also on other websites and services such as Apple’s iTunes.

There are plenty of websites that say they will extract the audio in MP3 format but unfortunately due to a change in the TOS (Terms of Service) on YouTube they have all been forced to close down – boo.

So instead of converting from YouTube we can convert from the original .WMV file that we created in Windows Movie Maker.

I found a Free Video to MP3 conversion tool on CNET downloads and used that to create a “Standard Quality” mp3 file.

I then uploaded that to the server and tested that it worked OK by navigating to the file in a browser:
http://www.answerhero.co.uk/podcasts/audio/20090513-long-tail-keywords.mp3.
The file played fine on my browser using Quicktime so that was great.

In order to turn the MP3 file into a podcast you need to create some XML. There are a number of tools around that can help you with this but once you get over the shock of seeing raw XML for the first time it’s actually quite easy to create this in Notepad. Ongoing I may choose to use one of these tools to speed things up but for my first podcast I created the XML manually.

The basic XML layout is available from the iTunes Podcast Specs page and just needs modifying for your own needs.
This is what I ended up with:

<br /> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><br /> <rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"></p> <p><channel></p> <link>http://www.AnswerHero.co.uk/blog</link> <language>en-us</language><br /> <copyright>℗ & © 2009 Advanced System Technologies Ltd.</copyright><br /> <itunes:subtitle>Affiliate Marketing Laid Bare</itunes:subtitle><br /> <itunes:author>Chris Young</itunes:author><br /> <itunes:summary>These podcasts accompany the blog at AnswerHero.co.uk/blog which details all the steps we took in creating a brand new Money Making Affiliate Website</itunes:summary><br /> <description>UK Super Affiliate Chris Young and Nigel Frith cover all the steps they took to create a brand new UK Money Making Affiliate Website from inception to monetisation. Visit the blog and follow the journey!</description><br /> <itunes:owner><br /> <itunes:name>Chris Young</itunes:name><br /> <itunes:email>chris.young@eastuk.com</itunes:email><br /> </itunes:owner><br /> <itunes:image href="http://www.answerhero.co.uk/images/chris-young.jpg" /><br /> <itunes:category text="Business"><br /> <itunes:category text="Management & Marketing"/><br /> </itunes:category></p> <p><item></p> <p><itunes:author>Chris Young</itunes:author><br /> <itunes:subtitle>Why New Affiliate should use the Long Tail</itunes:subtitle><br /> <itunes:summary>This short podcast explains the pitfalls that new affiliate make when trying to target competitive terms and why the long tail is the answer.</itunes:summary><br /> <enclosure url="http://www.answerhero.co.uk/podcasts/audio/20090513-long-tail-keywords.mp3" length="3346393" type="audio/mpeg" /></p> <pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 09:00:00 GMT</pubDate> <itunes:duration>3:29</itunes:duration><br /> <itunes:keywords>affiliate, marketing, make money, entrepeneur</itunes:keywords><br /> </item></p> <p></channel><br /> </rss></p> <p>

Feel free to take a copy of this XML and modify for your own needs.
Most of the elements are self-explanatory but the following need a little explaining and Apple do a great job of telling you exactly what to do so I will just link to their explanation:

• Categories
• File Length – search for “” on the above page – it’s the third occurrence.
• Duration

Once the XML is complete I uploaded it to the server and then tested it in iTunes by subscribing to it.
I had an error on my category tags initially but soon sorted that out and the hey presto – it was downloading into my iTunes – fantastic!