As part of our planned expansions into other countries for AnswerHero, we have two major things to consider:

1) Hosting – how should we do it for each country version (read the blog post here)
2) Domains – do we go sub domains, sub directories or unique domain?

Now when it comes to sub domains or sub directories, it can lead to various problems. Matt Cutts explains this here so rather than me waffle on – read his wise words.

In any event we wanted to do it the hard way and create a separate site for each country. This obviously meant getting the domains. The first thing we did was decide which countries we have plans for and which we do not. Some countries we have decided not to target at all in any eventuality so even though countries like india have huge traffic and will get bigger exponetially, we have left it from our list full stop.

The good news was, that for every country we wanted a domain for – it was free. With the exception of the .com which I manage to buy for a very reasonable sum.

The main issue with certain country extensions is that you have to have either a company or a residence within the country. I got quotes from three companies that said thay can provide this as a virtual service for us. It was staggering how much variation each quote came in at. For the full regsitration service (including the virtual residence/business aspect), it varied from £2000 down to £800. Most expensive was Globalgold.co.uk

The company we used in the end was Instra.com – they were excellent.

The next site we are rolling out is AnswerHero.de

Being as we have almost got the UK (.co.uk) version on AnswerHero done from an indexing and basic user features point of view- (still a few cosmetics tweaks needed), we decided to get on with the task of rolling out new country sites.

When we decided to take AnswerHero global, (sounds a bit grand I know but as many of you will know, it’s no small undertaking to decide to create other couintry versions of a service, we will tell you how we get on with everything involved for AnswerHero on this blog) we set about deciding on which countries we wanted to feature in – once we had decided that, my job was to acquire the domains. You can read about what we did here to get tricky domains like .fr registered. To summarise it for you – we now have every country domain we wanted (10 in total).

We have been storing as many other language “who, what, where, how, etc” style queries in a DB and with the technical aspects working ok, the next task is to go and find an appropriate host. Not quite as straightforward as you would think. The key thing we need to bear in mind is that each site must ideally be hosted within the country we are wanting to rank for. You may disagree with this, of course Google is clever enough to work out which country a site is meant for but in reality, it sets you back a long way in getting indexed and ranked properly if you do not do the basic ground work of getting hosted in-country based on the domain.

The sort of issues we faced were the fact that the site is good old ASP, also we are being cheap bastards and going for shared hosting, until such time as traffic merits a dedicated server anyway. The issue is that most shared servers within the prices lines we wanted to pay were either PHP or ASP.net. We need ASP and MySql.

To cut a long story short – I eventually found hosteurope.de to be most accomodating. They have confirmed to me that their servers are based in Germany but I am going to double check that before I buy. I was going to go for a 1and1 server package – assuming that because they are German, it would be German based… wrong! you only get a German based server if you sign up with 1und1.de – if you use their UK version of the site 1and1.co.uk, the servers are based outside Germany – so it is worth checking.

Here is the package we are 99% going for – and for 15 EURO/mth not bad value:

* IIS: 6.0
* Microsoft FTP Server 6.0
* NET Framework 1.1
* NET Framework 2.0
* Windows Service Pack 2

Plesk und installierte Software:

* ASP 6.0.3790.4195
* ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
* ASP.NET Enterprise Manager 0.1.3
* AWStats 6.6 (build 1.887)
* BIND DNS Server 9.4.2-P1
* DrWeb 4.44.0.10170 (E-Mail)
* FastCGI 6.1.36.1
* Horde Webmail IMP H3 (4.1.6)
* MailEnable Standard 1.986
* myLittleAdmin 2000 2.7.r126, 2005 3.2
* MySQL 5.0.45
* MySQL ODBC connector 3.51.25
* Perl v5.8.8 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
* Plesk: 8.6.0.5
* Plesk Agent 1.5.2.1
* PHP 4.4.7
* PHP 5.2.6
* phpMyAdmin 2.11.6
* Python 2.5.0.0
* SpamAssassin 3.2.3
* stunnel 4.07
* Webalizer V2.01-10-RB02 (Windows NT 5.2) English

Plesk 8.6 Third-Party;

Mailserver:

* MailEnable Standard 1.986
* MailEnable Professional 3.14
* MailEnable Enterprise 3.14
* Merak 9.2.1
* SmarterMail 5.1
* MDaemon 9.6.6
* hMailServer 4.4.1
* CommuniGate Pro 5.2.3

Antivirus:

* DrWeb 4.44.0.10170 (E-Mail)
* Kaspersky AV 5.0.0.49 (E-Mail)
* ClamWin 0.93
* Merak Antivirus (E-Mail)

DNS Server:

* Microsoft DNS 5.2
* BIND DNS Server 9.4.2-P1
* Simple DNS Plus 5.0

FTP Server:

* Microsoft FTP 6.0
* Gene6 FTP Server 3.10
* Serv-U FTP Server 6.4

Webstatistiken:

* Webalizer V2.01-10-RB02
* AWStats 6.6
* SmarterStats 3.3
* Urchin 5.7

SiteBuilder:

* SiteBuilder for Windows 4.2.108

Web Administration Tools:

* phpMyAdmin 2.11.6
* ASP.NET Enterprise Manager 0.1.3
* myLittleAdmin 2000 2.7.r126, 2005 3.2

Datenbankserver:

* Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Verwaltung über Plesk nur in Verbindung mit VPS MAX mit MS SQL Server Workgroup)
* MySQL 5.0.45

Webmail:

* Horde IMP H3 (4.1.6)
* MailEnable Web Client
* IceWarp Web Mail
* SmarterMail Web Client
* CommuniGate Pro Web Client

Spam-Filter:

* SpamAssassin 3.2.3
* Merak Spamfilter
* SmarterMail Spamfilter

Stand: 30.03.2009

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.

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)

Finally we have received the design for the AnswerHero.co.uk site!

With over 5000 pages now indexed by Google and the visitor numbers steadily increasing implementing a user friendly design has become ever more important.

Rather than work on all of the functionality we have decided to get the new design live immediately and then work on the features that have not yet been coded separately.

There are a couple of tweeks that we need the designers to make – the most important one being that they removed the h1 tag from the top of the answer pages, which would have a negative effect on search engine rankings. I have simply replaced this but it looks a bit ugly now so I have passed it back to them.

One new feature we have added is the search. On a site such as this, with many thousands of questions and answers, the search is an extremely important feature.

The easy option here would have been to use the Google search “widget” but that would not fit in with the style of the new design so I coded up a simple search script in ASP.

The interesting thing now will be to see what difference the new design makes to both the bounce rate and the time on site. We will keep you posted!

Well there are now 3990 pages in Google and we are getting about 200 visitors a day to the site so it’s looking good.

As you can see from the Google Anlaytics below the bounce rate is very high but that is to be expected as we have not yet implemented the new design which should be ready any day now.

Once we have this we can see how much of a difference it makes to the analytics and, as usual, we’ll post a blog to let you know.

At this point we could decide to put some advertising, such as AdSense, on the site and try to get some income from the visitors we are already getting but as the site is so ugly it could cause problems if someone from Google did a manual review so we will wait until the new design is live before making any decisions on advertising.

Well I am pleased to say we are very much nearly there with the design. Below is the (almost) finished version of what the home page will look like.

Click here to see the logo as a pencil sketch - this was done by our Uzbekistan designers using a brief from us and they got it right first time (which is rare when using overseas resources) -

Almost finished design of the home page (we are still making refinements)

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.

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!!!