[ ! ] The Sugarbuzz Project - A day in the life of an affilate marketer… Skip to content

[ ! ] The Sugarbuzz Project

A day in the life of an affilate marketer…

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I have been running this blog for over two years now (well, probably closer to three although I’ve only had the .net domain for two years) and one thing still bugs me a bit. No matter how many blogs, ebooks or diatribes I read, I just can’t quite wrap my head around the concept of SEO and SERPs. I usually try not to worry that much about proper keyword content or anything.

Another concept I generally don’t freak out that much about is page rank. The main page of this site once hit PR3. It has since dwindled back down to a PR1 status. Does this bother me? Not really. I don’t really see a huge point in trying to gain page rank, since I generally end up with backlinks from random spam sites and scrapers anyway. When it comes to links, I’ll take what I can get.

What does puzzle me, though, is how one of my internal pages can rank high enough in Google to actually pull in a little bit of traffic on a steady basis. I’m scratching my head, because I would like to think that I have more than one well written page on this site. I’m sure that’s pretty subjective though.

So which page is it that’s pulling in traffic? It’s my post on “The Importance of Good Employee Relations“. Yep. Nothing that I’ve written about freelancing, affiliate marketing, or just random ranting has done this.

I was sitting around one day, thinking that I really needed to write something that was business-oriented. While I’m not a manager at my day job, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a common-sense guide on how to be a good boss from an employee’s perspective. Somehow, I managed to stumble on something pretty sweet.

While the page itself doesn’t have any page rank points with the big G, a quick search for ‘importance of employee relations’ will turn my link up on the first page. And to top that off, it’s the third result…and it’s only beat out by a bizmove site and a NASA site. Really, I’m OK with being the third search result out of 1,070,000 results. :D

One thing that I have notices is that it provides me with a VERY tiny trickle of income from the AdBrite ads on the page. I’m trying to come up with a better way to monetize that page right now. I’ve been also considering expanding my coverage on business topics. I also should focus more on researching my keywords…even though this one I came across by sheer dumb luck.

Are any of you having luck with getting ranked for any of your pages that you just wrote on a whim with no SEO work?

 


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I’ve always wondered what it is about California that causes people to be just plain crazy and/or stupid. Yes, I know, there are exceptions. But based on what I have seen personally, most of them are just total wackos.

Case in point: this is one of the funniest tech calls I have ever heard. Listen. Laugh. Laugh some more. I wonder how Leo Laporte kept his decorum through this call…I would have just laughed…and been far more blunt.

 


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Here’s how to have a great week. This is basically a rundown of what I’ve been up to the last couple of days (and also why I’ve been neglecting my blog)…you know, if you were following me on Twitter, you’d know this stuff by now…

1. Get an exceptionally large income tax return.

2. Realize that you have a few things you need to pay for, but really not more than a couple of hundred dollars.

3. Take a friend out for sushi.

4. Take friend out for lunch the next day, then go to the shooting range and unload a couple boxes of ammo.

5. Buy a new guitar and amp.

6. Take three friends out for dinner.

7. Take four friends (not counting the one you meet up with later) out and drive an hour and a half to Houston for a Cowboy Mouth concert. Proceed to rock your ever loving butt off with those friends, when an old high school friend and another awesome friend show up at the show, then proceed to rock out more losing about 20 lbs. via sweat and jumping around and screaming like a 5 year old who found the sugar stash.

8. Take friends to IHOP.

9. Drive back 1.5 hours and crash. Sleep till about 10 AM.

10. Call that place that you applied for a job at. Realize that you did, in fact, get the job, which means a pay raise AND the ability to work in jeans and tee shirts.

Yeah. I’m having a pretty good week so far. :D

 


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We all know that WordPress is an awesome blogging platform. Honestly, I can’t see why anybody would want to blog with any other substandard tool. But besides its ease of use, the best thing about WordPress is its ability to be made better with the addition of plugins. I wanted to share a few of the plugins that I use on this blog, and give you a bit about why I can’t live without them.

CommentLuv – The CommentLuv plugin is awesome. Whenever a legitimate user (not you spammers) leaves a comment on my blog, CommentLuv will automagically connect to their blog and add a link to their latest post on their comment. It’s a great way to share the link love.

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments does exactly what it sounds like. It gives folks who comment a chance to get an email whenever someone replies to their comment (or to the post). How does this help bloggers? It reminds them that there was a blog that they commented on, and that they should return to your page. Nice, huh?

Tweet This – This plugin adds a ‘Tweet This Post’ option to your blog posts. It also can shorten URLs using Bit.ly so that your tweets don’t get truncated.

Twitter Tools – Another Twitter related plugin, this one helps integrate your blog with Twitter, autoposting a tweet whenever you publish a new post. This in conjunction with Tweet This can add a potential viral factor to your blog. Just publish your post, let the readers come, and they retweet it. Nice, right?

Ninja Affiliate – This, to me, is the mother of all WordPress plugins. It’s not a free product, but it is by far the most useful plugin I have ever used. Basically, it’s a URL cloaker that also can replace keywords in your blog with affiliate links. Can you say money? I knew you could. Not only is it great for use inside the blog, but you can use it to make your affiliate link easier to remember, such as http://thesugarbuzzproject.net/my-affiliate-link. Sure beats trying to memorize all of those numbers, letters, and weird characters, right? Believe me, if you can fit it into your blog’s budget, I can’t emphasize enough the value of this plugin.

 


If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!

 

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I’m not watching the Super Bowl. Why? Because I’m just not that into sports. Instead, I’m looking to find myself in the middle of a good Magic: the Gathering duel. Yes, I am that big of a nerd.

For some people, it is a lot of fun to hang out, get wasted and watch a bunch of huge dudes kill each other on the field. But for me, why watch it on television when I can have the same effect (but a bit more interactive) with a good Magic game? Large creatures killing each other, now that’s my kind of game.

I’ve decided to do a bit of gear shifting, given some new life developments. I want this blog to have more content posted more frequently, and in order to do that, I really need to focus on making it a lot more personal. That, and doing so will give me another method of relieving the stress in my life.

How can I be so stressed out all of the time? Well, here’s a rundown of my week: Monday through Wednesday, I didn’t go to work because of the stress and negativity that was piled on top of my depression. Thursday I lost my job. Friday my divorce became final. I’m doing what I can now to keep from killing myself…more figuratively than literally, but I have dealt with depression that was that severe for years, and in the past eight months, it’s become that severe again. I think I’m doing pretty good considering that I’m not on any antidepressants or anything like that.

To tell the truth, some days I just don’t even want to get out of bed. Yesterday, I slept until about 5 PM. Yes, PM. This isn’t the “dot com lifestyle” I had in mind. In fact, I’ve been dealing with so much that I’ve all but stopped doing freelance writing or any kind of serious marketing endeavors.

Really, what I need now more than anything else is encouragement from my friends, family and readers. My life really has been sucking beyond any reason, and some days I just don’t want to go on living, let alone marketing. Then again, I like making a bit of extra money here and there, and that helps distract me a bit.

What about you? Are any of you other bloggers dealing with life situations that are just so stressful that you don’t want to continue? What do you do to force yourself to carry on?

 


If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!

 

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