At 19:08:32 on 17th November 2008, my cashback website received its 10,000th member!!! This was achieved in less than a year, as the first membership was registered on 22nd November 2007!

Mind you, there was a lot of hard work & plenty of advertising expense! I’ve even been leafleting shopping centre car parks in an attempt to entice shoppers from the stores to the internet, with the promise of free money!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the age of the site will come into play as time goes by – Google gives great emphasis to sites of a certain age & this helps improve natural rankings.

The continued exposure of the site & recommendations from existing members should continue to recruit new members, but there is also a lot of competition out there /

Hopefully the costs of advertising will be less than the revenue from the site in the long term & I’m still hoping to be able to get the cashbackshopper.com domain up & running in the US at some point.

The latest Alexa ranking chart has been published by Cashback News & I was very pleased to see Cashback Shopper reach the dizzy heights of 14th place (although it looks like a slight error means I’m really 15th)!! Bearing in mind there are now 124 cashback sites in the chart, I certainly believe I must be doing something right!

Although the top 4 are like the Big 4 Premier League clubs & always seem to be in the same spot, overtaking Free Fivers was a real high point for me as they”ve been running for years & claim to have over 231000 members!!

I just hope I can keep the momentum going….here are the top 20 sites:

1. Quidco 19,166
2. Rpoints 77,337
3. Top Cashback 77,558 – ↑1
4. GreasyPalm 84,226 – ↓1
5. MutualPoints 103,947
6. eDeals UK 105,981 – ↑1
7. Paypal Offers 108,107 – ↑13
8. wepromiseto.co.uk 139,736 – ↑11
9. Give or Take 149,208 – ↓3
10. Cashback Kings 187,600
11. froggybank 191,141 – ↓3
12. NHScashback 206,077 – ↑9
13. Comparison Plus 238,505 – ↑2
14. Cashback Shopper 244,859 – ↑12
15. MoneyBackMadness 238,770 – ↓6
16. RupizCompare 272,581 – ↓3
17. CashbackToYou 289,869 – ↑14
18. Free Fivers 299,035 – ↓6
19. Linemypocket 302,300 – ↓5
20. eCashBack 352,290 – ↓4

Following rumours that Best of the Web Directory (the internet’s oldest directory) are going to buy DMOZ, which Google uses as its own Directory source, I decided to try & get some of my sites listed.

Also known as the open directory project, DMOZ is probably the most well known free directory online. Like Yahoo and Best of the Web, DMOZ is also known for its very high standards when it comes to website listings in the directory. It is best to submit your site to DMOZ on your own.

Considerable effort needs to be spent on making the right submission, according to the guidelines mentioned. You only get one chance to have your site listed in DMOZ, hence it must be ensured that the submission is made properly.

Best of the Web Directory like Yahoo Directory was established in 1994 and has since maintained one of the strictest editorial review policies, accepting only content-rich, high quality sites. This commitment to quality has made it one of the most highly regarded directories on the web. A link from Best of the Web directory would immensely benefit a site, substantially increasing its search engine rankings. Best of the web directory is a paid directory currently offering two listing options: one for an annual review of the website which costs US$ 99.95 per year and one for a one-time review which costs US$ 249.95.

Because I wasn’t sure that my site would be accepted & the fee is non-refundable, I decided to opt for the annual review option first & see what happened….better to lose $100 than $250!!!

I submitted 2 of my sites to the Directory: Cashback Shopper & My Travel Extras. My concern with Cashback Shopper was that it is a white label site & could possibly be considered as duplicate content. However, I needn’t have worried, within 12 hours I received an e-mail telling me that my submission had been successful & my link would appear on the site within 24 hours! )

My Travel Extras has also been accepted & the good news is that the sites can still be upgraded to the one time review option, albeit at a cost of $239.95…..but at least I know they will be accepted! Because this directory is so well respected, I hope it will add to my tally of backlinks in Google, which are looking pretty threadbare at the moment when compared to those from Yahoo.

I am considering adding other sites to the directory in the future, but at the moment the cost of advertising is too high to add any others. I also want to see if the directory submissions make any difference to my rankings.

I blogged previously about the failure of my short breaks white label site to make any sales, whilst it was integrated into the main My Travel Extras site.

As a result, I set up the site as a standalone short breaks mini-site & have just set a PPC campaign on Google, using only 3 or 4 (or even more), exact match keyphrases. I’ve created 4 different ad variations & limited my bids to £0.50 so that I’m not spending too much per click. With this budget, Google predicts at an average CPC of £0.37 – £0.49, these keywords could potentially generate 36 – 69 clicks per day (which would cost £20 – £40).

I think this is plenty for now, assuming a few sales come from these clicks(!), but I will be fine tuning the campaign as I go & see if these figures improve. If Superbreak make sales, then using an identical copy of their site & directing relevant traffic MUST generate sales, musn’t it?!!!!!

Time will tell!

Despite advertising the page through PPC, I have still made no sales from my Superbreak white label site & this is starting to annoy me! The site is a direct copy of the Superbreak online hotel directory for UK and European hotel bookings & they do ok, so why no sales?!

I’m wondering if it was because the site was embedded in an iframe on the My Travel Extras site & this may have looked a bit strange to new visitors. The bounce rate from the site was over 53%, which is not so good so as a result, I’ve decided to try an experiment & promote the site as a standalone mini-site, rather than part of the main one. I’ve set up a subdomain http://shortbreaks.mytravelextras.co.uk & will be able to build links to this site instead, which still shows my branding, but looks a little tidier.

The subdomain uses a frame redirect to display the site as this allows me to avoid the superbreak name appearing anywhere in the URL & I’m going try to submit this subdomain to directories & market it using specific products rather than generic terms such as short breaks, city breaks etc.

Fingers crossed it might actually make a sale or two before Christmas! /

I blogged previously about Find Me Dates, my new dating website built using the White Label Dating system. With some limited advertising, using Gumtree, Facebook & Miva, I have already had some members sign up as paying members, but at the moment, the cost of advertising is more than the money received from memberships /

Following on from this, I also launched an adult dating site, Find Me Adult Dates, which has had as many paying members join up without ANY advertising, other than a free ad on Gumtree!

The landing page has been optimised for adult dating keyphrases – casual relationships, casual sex, adult finder, adult dating, adult contacts, adult sex contacts, adult chatrooms, sex personals, adult online dating, which all had a good KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index), which is the ration of searches to results in the search engines.

I have set up a PPC campaign on Miva and have added the site to a couple of banner exchanges, so will keep an eye on how it goes.

I’ve recently dipped my toe back into the world of Google Adwords!

Recently I have concentrated my efforts on Miva & Yahoo PPC campaigns because they are still affordable for particular sites, whereas Google is not. But, with so many UK users only using Google for their internet searching, is it worthwhile; how many potential customers are going to my opposition?

So, I have once again bitten the bullet & decided to run a campaign on Google for Cashback Shopper, with a daily limit of £5. But, as the minimum bid amount quickly went from £2, to £2.50 & then in some cases to £5, is this value for money, or just a rip off?!!

Although the minimum bid to activate the keyword [cashback] is £5, the actual average CPC over the last week has been £2.35. However, this is still taking half my daily budget for clicks – two clicks & my campaign was off / With a CTR of 4.28%, maybe it’s not worth running this phrase & working only on longer tail keyphrases which will leave the campaign running longer and with a higher CTR. The table below shows how many clicks I’m getting for my £5 over the last 7 days & Google reckons I’m not receiving 82% of my eligible impressions!!

18 Aug Campaign activity: 4 Clicks 5.24
19 Aug Campaign activity: 7 Clicks 4.99
20 Aug Campaign activity: 6 Clicks 5.10
21 Aug Campaign activity: 4 Clicks 5.01
22 Aug Campaign activity: 7 Clicks 5.00
23 Aug Campaign activity: 6 Clicks 4.75
24 Aug Campaign activity: 5 Clicks 5.26

Google suggests a daily budget of £27.34!!!! Is this beyond the reach of many affiliate marketers? It certainly seems beyond mine!! But would those clicks convert to “sales”? This is the choice that has to be made & for many new PPC advertisers, it can be an expensive one – I know, I’ve been there!

My overall CTR for the last week has been 6.98% at an average CPC of £0.91, so this isn’t too bad. Purchases made through the site have increased substantially over the last couple of weeks & the new £50 prize draw competition I am running should create more sign ups from friend referrals, at much better value than PPC!!!

Because of the decent ROI I seem to be getting from the Google PPC campaign, I have suspended all my other search engine campaigns for now & have upped the daily Adwords spend to £10 (not yet the £27.34 recommended!) and will keep monitoring the CTR & ROI closely.

Naturally, if spending continues to grow, it would certainly be worth re-investing the income back into further advertising!

In the financial world, the FTSE has key figures that the market use as pointers to whether the market will rise or fall over the next few weeks. If the FTSE hits the magical figure, then confidence rises etc.

So, I’ve decided to announce that Cashback Shopper has reached the milestone (albeit modest) membership total of 5000! Naturally, the membership of cashback sites is fairly fluid, with people switching from one to another to get sign up bonuses etc. but I’m pleased to have reached this total & plan to celebrate by running a competition on the site!

I will be offering a (also modest) cash prize draw – every pound earned in cash-back by members will qualify them for an entry into the draw. Luckily, eDealsUK have all the tools to be able to offer and administer this, built into their white label system & so I just have to offer & publicise the competition.

As soon as the competition details are finalised, I’ll advertise it both here and on the site, as well as by newsletter to the members )

Matt Cutts recently announced on his blog that Google would be updating the Page Rank toolbar with its latest ranking changes (although these changes have been active for about 3 months before getting to us).

Despite varying opinions on the importance or validity of Page Rank, it’s nice to see that Cashback Shopper & FreshWebz have both risen to PR3!

Also, after dropping a few places (over 98,000) on the Alexa ranking, to 498,959 at the end of June, Cashback Shopper has pulled back up to 468,108 as of today. This is still the highest placed white label site in the Cashback News chart!

Some time ago, I set up a white label dating site, using the DIY Dating webmaster programme.

The site, Looking4Me, is still running but I have to be honest & say it was pretty much a “build & leave it” job; I really haven’t spent much effort in promoting it – added it to a couple of dating traffic exchanges and did some link exchanges, but other projects took over & I felt that the dating market was far too competitive to spend time & money on PPC. I have had 205 people sign up & few have even paid for a membership (they join the existing membership, totalling about 300000 members), but I still haven’t done much pushing of the site.

However, I recently received a brochure from White Label Dating, stating that they had a number of site owners earning considerable sums from their websites (between £20k & £30k a month!!). Obviously, I am not aiming for anything like this, but it seems that Internet Dating is still a booming industry & it would be stupid to not try & take advantage of it as an affiliate marketer!

So I decided to give it a go & set up another dating site, Find Me Dates, using the White Label Dating system. There are a number of big name companies using their system, but it seemed they were all using a landing page, rather than using the white label site as their home page. So I’ve done the same thing myself. A landing page allows you to optimise for search engines & make the site look good.

I was able to add features from the dating engine to the landing page, such as a member search & pictures of the newest members & then any click through takes the user to the membership pages. The landing page has been optimised for 10 dating keyphrases – london dating, dating agencies, dating agency, friend finder, online dating, uk singles, dating site, uk dating, internet dating, dating girls, which all had a good KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index), which is the ration of searches to results in the search engines. I will be submitting to web directories, using combinations of these keywords to generate inbound links & will see how the rankings go.

In addition, I am considering a PPC campaign on Miva, but still need to carry out research on the cost per click for what is a competitive sector – I may have to pick some very exact, long tail phrases to start with!