“This is a general question really and might apply to any affiliate site.

Suppose you want to feature a product that has several models and is available from several retailers. If you’re not using JS to bring in the comparisons and there’s say 12 mentions of the model, perhaps with just a model number varying…

Presumably that could suffer a keyword stuffing penalty?

So, suppose it’s also got a ~500 words of content that someone has written.

2 options – wondering which is ‘safest’ from an seo point of view:

1. Keep the content on one page with a big click-here box and put the comparison on another robots blocked page (then risk not having direct call to action on indexed pages).

2. Put it all on the same page and hope the algo doesn’t take offence.

It’s very noticeable that the big comparison sites have pages right up high in Google where there is very little original content on the page, and plenty aren’t running JS to show the comparison. So presumably those are ranked because of the site authority.

However, if you’ve got a newish site, what’s the safest option?

Also an afterthought: if you use JS to bring in comparisons that are hidden from the engines and you’re an affiliate site, aren’t you still at risk of a bad manual review if you don’t have a decent level of content as well (or is that paranoid).

Thanks Bob”

Kier

Hi Bob

I wouldn’t worry too much about a penalty or mess about keeping robots out of a certain page etc. Just build a good site and you should be fine.

It takes a lot more to annoy Google than most people think. Whilst you may not have loads of original content (although it’s always a good idea) if the comparison you’re providing is decent they’re unlikely to give you a mad manual review at least.

Of course over time Google does tweak the algo to ensure that users get the best experience so you might get penalised. Having said that you can still send paid traffic to the site and if it’s well built then it should be a good converter for you.

Lammo

Hi Bob

Personally, I’d keep it all on the one page, displaying the prices only (therefore not showing the product title, in this case slightly differing model numbers) embedded within the main content. I’d serve the prices using Java, as I see no benefit in making this content spiderable.

You’re spot on I think that the big players are ranking well without much in the way of content due to their authority overall – If you want to beat them, you’re going to need something better, whether that be a good level of unique content, user reviews, or lots of links to the product pages.

In short, I wouldn’t worry about getting a bad manual review for having a low level of content. I’d make sure I had a good level of content! The days of knocking up a quick 100,000 page “price comparison” site are long gone I’m afraid – There is no easy route to riches anymore!

Tim wrote in to ask for some pointers on his new gadget review site – gadgetopinions.co.uk.

“Hi Guys.

I would like to submit my new website for surgery consideration.

Any advice would be appreciated since I am still deciding which direction to go in with the site. I’m trying to decide whether or not I should cover mainstream gadgets, or whether I should put my focus onto hi-tech, “long-tail” gadgets.

Thanks, Tim.”

Here’s what Jay and Clarke had to say …

Jay

Strategy

My recommendation to you would be to continue providing the reviews you are doing, but also to develop slightly more niche reviews to build up your website. This would have the benefit of developing a USP, ensuring that people come to your site for those specialist reviews. You should strive to ensure that reviews are as timely as possible too, reacting to new product launches or events to ensure that you are seen as up-to-date – something that is very important in the gadget world.

You should really try to keep updating the site as frequently as you can. This will ensure that you always have fresh content. I’d recommend outsourcing if you cannot do this yourself. The more relevant, fresh content, the better for both user experience and for search engines.

Content

I noticed that you also have a section named ‘gadget guides’ which could be a great way to get content on the site that would draw in visitors and act as link bait. If these were comprehensive and kept up to date (think about automating or outsourcing the content if needs be), then they could really support your site’s content. However, it’s important to note that visitors searching for ‘guides’ probably already own mobile phones, and so they probably won’t be looking to purchase anything. Unless of course the guides showed that accessories were the way forward, but these are low value. Lots of pros and cons to this strategy! But the guides could always include Adsense or display ads.

You should also ensure that all pages are highly targeted though contextual ads / other content to make sure that users have the best possible experience. So when someone visits for a particular review, the ads on that page should be as relevant as possible. The large display ad you have in the top of the side bar is often distracting through animation and not very well related. Another idea is to make use of features such as links to related posts (WordPress has the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that works wonders), show tweets that talk about that content or any other related content, whether it is on your site or from another social site.

SEO

Taking a step back and looking at the site from a different – SEO – angle, I would highly recommend that you identify your core keywords, then your ‘secondary’ keywords and so on. These will be different according to each page, but will help guide the structure of the site and the content. For example, one of the core keywords for your home page is ‘gadget reviews’. Other core keywords for rest the site would be categories such as ‘laptop reviews’ or ‘mobile phone reviews’ or ‘mobile phone user guides’ and so on. All of these core keywords should really form the main navigation on the site, dictating the core directories and ‘hubs’ for the reviews etc.

For the review pages, the keywords they should be targeting would include the make and model of the gadget followed by ‘review’, such as ‘Dell Inspiron 1525 review”, but you may want to do some research using the Google Keyword Tool for example, to see which keywords have the most traffic but least competition, and compare these numbers to your existing highest converting keywords on the site.

SEO ‘quick wins’

Browsing the site, there are a few ‘quick wins’ you could fix before even getting to the site structure and content stage which include ensuring that you promote the most important headings on pages, and demote those that are less important. For example, some review pages have an empty <H2> heading tag. Why not structure your review so that the main heading includes the core keywords (probably the make and model plus the word ‘review’), and then have subheadings with some keyword variation to break up the text which would make the reviews easy and attractive to read.

The page <titles> should also include the core keyword for each page first, followed by keyword variations or a succinct description.

Location-based targeting

I noticed that in some instances you are using adding ‘UK’ to some page <titles> for example. I’m not convinced that the content you are offering is location dependent. The content is actually fairly universal. If you wish to narrow down your targeting to just a UK audience, for example for your affiliate programs, then in addition to your .co.uk domain name, you should consider getting UK-based web hosting and adding location centric content such as shop locations and shop reviews or price/service comparisons to strengthen this targeting. Comparing shops (such as John Lewis, Currys, Amazon UK) would narrow down your target audience naturally, as not all these shops are available internationally.

Clarke

Hi Tim.

Firstly, get rid of the Google Advert Banner across the middle top of your site, I feel it’s a huge turn off if it’s the first and main thing you see, however feel free to add it down the bottom of the site. You already have a Google Ads on the top right square box and you really don’t need much more than that as the initial thing users see.

The reviews are not very inspiring, one paragraph of text and no images, flesh it out with an image of what you’re talking about.

Get some kind of directory structure in your main url paths (I see you have a directory but it’s separate from the actual product urls) and start to build up different sections to your site. As it stands you have all the products in their own directory, whereas if I was on site looking at mobile or laptop reviews, I would expect to click down and read other reviews.

You can’t click on any of the reviews to go to a site selling them or a manufacture site, I take it your plan is to add Affiliate links later, if not and it’s just about showing Google Adverts, then I can’t see this ever working at any great scale, but if that’s the case then bear minimum to expect is to see a row of Google AdSense adverts after the review.

By the way, you also need to update your WordPress version and the plugins you’re using.  By not keeping up-to-date with the latest Wordpress versions and plugins, you put your site at risk and you also miss out on improvements to the code.

Editor’s Note

Hi Tim.

Thanks for sending in your site for review and hope that Jay and Clarke have given you some ideas on what to do. The gadget sector is definitely a tough one to tackle with the amount of competition and high quality sites that are out there. Having said that, Kirsty’s post on niche selection yesterday was an interesting read, so check that out as well. One of the points relevant to your case was not letting pre-conceptions prevent you from entering a niche that you think is over saturated: “Choose a small area and don’t take on the big boys, but don’t be put off by a little competition either” … best of luck.

“Dear Affiliate Doctors.

Up until a week ago I worked for a large video game company as one of their senior programmers until they decided that they were going to make half of their staff “at risk” of redundancy.  This means that after a 30-day consultation period I will find out if I am actually redundant but it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that I will lose my job at the start of March [editor’s note: Marc has since lost his job].  For the past 15 years I’ve worked in the video games industry and this will be the third time I’ve lost my job in the past 10 years, whilst also avoiding losing it twice in that time.  It’s not an industry to be in if you want job security!  I have a wife and two young children, and I’m a bit fed up of the constant threat of job loss and the industry’s expectation that its staff will work ridiculous hours.

As I will be getting four months of pay in addition to a redundancy package, I’m thinking that it might be time to leave this badly managed industry behind and take the plunge into starting my own affiliate-based business.  I’ve been dabbling with affiliate marketing for the past year or two and had some mixed results with the minimal time I’ve put into it.  This experience has been the creation of a few niche mini-sites, PPC to some of those sites and direct-to-Amazon PPC (when it was allowed).

So on to my question …  With the money I will be paid, I should have at least enough to keep my mortgage and bills paid for 6 to 12 months.  However, I’m mindful that I might have to get a job at some point within that time period to make sure we keep the roof over our heads if any circumstances should change.  I’d like to focus 100% of my energy on creating a sustainable business, but my problem is that I’m not sure where to focus that energy so that I make the most of my free time.

If the Affiliate Doctors were in my position, what would they suggest I do in order to start creating a long-term affiliate business?  I appreciate that six months might be a bit quick to start to become a so-called “Super Affiliate”, but any pointers in the right direction for not needing a normal job will be much appreciated.

As I’m a programmer by day, I have all of the necessary skills for web development, and this is something I enjoy and think I’m good at.  I have created a web application engine for price comparison from data feeds and this will probably take around another month to be totally finished.  Is it worth focusing on this or is the price comparison market far too competitive for a newbie?

I know that “if you had to start from scratch, how would you do it?” isn’t an easy question to answer, but I’m going to kick myself in a year from now if I don’t at least attempt to get a business started now that I have the chance.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Marc.”

Here’s what Mark Boyd and Elaine had to say …

Mark B

Hi Marc, sorry to hear about the redundancy, but one good thing to come of it is that you can push yourself to make a success of your affiliate business. Many don’t have that drive, and therefore fail, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing you losing your job.

OK, in a nutshell you’ve asked what I would do if I were in your shoes. Well, let’s just identify what sort of shoes you’re standing in before we move on…

– You’ve got some money to outlay to jumpstart an affiliate business
– You’ve got experience in affiliate marketing in general, website building and PPC
– You’ve got programming experience (having worked as a senior programmer)

So, basically, you’re wearing £500 black Italian leather shoes! You’ve got all the things that I didn’t have when I started out. The things that I do have now (not quite to the same extent as you, my programming sucks) five years down the line. So instead of telling you what I’d do if I were in your shoes, I’ll tell you what I’m doing, in um… my own shoes!

When I started in affiliate marketing, I started with just one site, dedicated to matched betting (recently sold this site to allow me to focus on my damn thesis, and I am still a little touchy about the whole thing, so let’s not mention this again!) and that was all that I focussed on. As time progressed I moved into the mini sites market and created hundreds of mini sites, with greatly differing results. I’m now at the stage where I’m going to move back to the larger sites (I’ll still make mini sites, I can’t help myself), and I’m doing so with my PPC shoes on. I’m lucky enough to have access to enough money to invest in making excellent sites and also to pump into a PPC budget for each site. So my focus recently has been on finding relatively generic sites that I can create, and then focus on PPC’ing specific sections of the sites that I know will convert well based on my mini sites experience.

For example (completely hypothetical), if I’d had a bunch of mini sites selling golf equipment that did particularly well, I’d be looking to create a generic site about all things golf, and then PPC the sections that are likely to convert effectively.

So, if I were you, I’d do the following:

– Create a list of generic sites you’d be interested in working on
– In the meantime, swot up on all things PPC, even if it’s just reading a couple of articles a day
– Identify the merchants related to each potential site, then analyse their conversion rates, commission rates, websites, etc etc to get a feel for how “worthy” they’d be of your promotion time
– Whittle the list down to just one site
– Hire a decent WordPress designer to make you a super sexy site that is geared up to convert from head to toe
– Invest your time/money in decent content, not only will this help your conversions, it will help your organic rankings
– Get cracking with your PPC campaigns, find out what works, and stick with it

Many people are scared by the horror stories of PPC. If you stick to a daily budget you can afford and utilise the matching options correctly, you’re not going to be in for any surprises. Start with just using exact match keywords (to do this, just put square brackets around the keyword when adding it to the campaign, so add [super duper high converting keyword]) and then when you’re more confident move onto broad matching, but only if you have a ridiculously long negative keyword list.
I wish you the best of luck, if you need any PPC help, feel free to give me a nudge!

Elaine

Hello Marc, just go for it.

I think you’ll find that once you have the time to concentrate fully on Affiliate Marketing you will become more focussed, and it’s much easier to complete projects when you have days instead of a few stolen hours.

Allkids really took off when I decided to leave my part-time job at the Halifax!!
If I had to start again, and I could replace my brain with a more technical one, I’d combine a niche I’m interested in with a price comparison model – don’t give your visitors the chance to leave and go looking elsewhere.  And don’t forget to include some pure information pages, if it’s relevant – they’re great for pulling in visitors and getting your site known.

I’d also look at using data feeds, but, if it’s a small site, you’ll need to be able to create your own descriptions, to differentiate your site from the crowd – Google likes ‘different’ and SEO is important – combined with good original content.

My latest project is looking at the conversion rates on our sites and how we can improve them, so that’s something I wish I’d spent a bit more time on before embarking on any changes!

I’d also take the time to attend industry gatherings and get to know other folk – it’s not just about making deals and coming away with profitable ideas and networking with the topcats – I find it does concentrate the mind and does give your morale a boost when you’ve spent some time with like minded people.

You won’t need a fancy pants, all singing and dancing site – just something that’s easy to use and easy to look at, and something you can update easily to take advantage of any special offers etc.

P.S. don’t spend too much time reading and learning either – it’s all very fascinating, but sometimes you just gotta get on with it

Editor’s Note

Hi Marc.

Thanks for writing in and being so open about things – it’s certainly an opportunity/dilemma that faces most people several times in their working life. Hope this helps you to make a decision in moving forward, and as an added bonus, Kirsty did a great article on a similar question she received few weeks ago in the Ask Kirsty section (3 docs for the price of 2!).

Best of luck mate and let us know how you get on.

Have you found yourself in a similar position to Marc and been able to turn it to your advantage?

“I’m completely stumped as to why my site isn’t making any conversions and I wondered if you guys would mind having a look to see if there’s anything I’m missing.

Website address – http://www.digioutput.co.uk/

The site is a PPC comparison site that (at the time of writing) has only been live for about a week, so I’m quite happy to sit on this for a little while as it’s not costing me all that much. However, I’m mystified as to why I’m not making any conversions.

Over the past week I’ve had 18,500 impressions, and out of that I’ve had 309 clicks (CTR 1.66% – not great, but not disastrous) and out of those 309 clicks I’ve made precisely 0 sales (and I’ve checked the links are working as they should be)!!

I’m reasonably sure my site isn’t crap as I have analytics running on it and it says my bounce rate is reasonably low – 34%, and the average time on site is actually quite high at 2min 46secs. On average each user looks at 5.35 pages and I have almost 90% new visitors … so I just can’t figure out what my problem is? I’ve been creating new content by writing news articles and adding additional pages, but since the site is only a week old, I guess all the content is pretty new.

I know the site’s only been live for a week, but I’m clearly attracting custom to it, but absolutely no one is generating any sales. I’m desperate for some help please Affiliate Doctors, this is driving me up the wall, there must be a solution! Have I just signed up to rubbish merchants?

Very much looking forward to your reply.

Mark”

Here’s what Mark, Elaine and Dan had to say …

Mark Boyd

Hi Mark, thanks for submitting your site to the doctors, I’ve got a few points which will hopefully help you increase your sales figures.

PRICE COMPARISON

The first thing that strikes me when looking at the product pages, is the lack of “price comparison”. Take a look @ http://www.digioutput.co.uk/product/3/Micro1112%20DAB/Goodmans-Micro1112-Dab.html for example, it shows the price from Bennetts, which may well be the best price, but how does your visitor know that unless you show them? You should bear in mind it’s not always about price, there are other factors that come into play when buying online, such as the consumers previous dealings with the company, returns policys, p&p costs etc.. So if I were you, I’d focus on adding as many prices to each product page as possible. You appear to be using ECU, so this should be relatively easy for you.
 
BUY NOW BUTTONS

I’d also have a look at some of the other buy now buttons that ECU have on offer, I personally prefer the buttons like http://www.easycontentunits.com/images/r-sn.png and I’ve found with a bit of A-B testing that they convert visitors to clickers very well! So, maybe give different buttons and colours of buttons a try and find out what works for you.

(buttons updated since review)

CONTENT

Not only does content help to improve your organic listings, it helps give the reader an idea of the quality of the site. If you’ve taken the time to handwrite 100’s of articles for the site, this hard work will be transferred to the consumer in terms of their perceived trust of the site. Again, looking at the Goodmans example, I’d immediately click away from that page and find a site that had taken the time to write a description.

I believe if you focus on those three things, getting them perfected, you’ll see an increase in your sales.

Best of luck!

Elaine

I’ve had quite a good look round your site, Mark, and there’s a ton of stuff you can fix, which will hopefully increase your sales.

1. Why all the review this, review that – I might want to send in a review after I’ve bought something, but not before – I do find it off putting.

2. At first glance it doesn’t  look like a price comparison site – I would expect 1 image and description and then a choice of merchants – it took me a while to detect that some of the products were actually the same – lots of images are missing which makes  it quite confusing.

3. The product images are quite small – I have found that the best converting sites have large images – so you can see exactly what you’re buying.

4. I’d prefer better descriptions or bullet points on the first page rather than have to click through all the products to discover the type I’m looking for – e.g.  I like a few preset buttons so I don’t have to keep retuning.

5. On the home page I’d put the best selling products at the top, with better images and descriptions and keep the blurb at the bottom or remove it.

6. The Digital Coverage page is a tad sparse, the link to the BBC site doesn’t work and the map doesn’t tell my anything!

7. The Radio Stations page is, again, a tad sparse, and the BBC link goes through to the wrong page, so I can’t find out which stations I can receive!

8. And the Why Dab page appears to be in Arabic!

To summarise – I’d spend a while cleaning up the site and providing good quality information without relying on third party sites – or at least ensure the links direct properly. Get rid of the request for reviews and the Add to my saved list – I can’t see that they serve a purpose.  Ensure all the images are available, make them bigger and produce better descriptions.

At the moment it doesn’t look very professional and instill confidence to buy, but with a bit of work I’m sure you’ll get there.

Dan

hi, Mark, how are you?

I like the niche (dab radios). And it looks like you’re using affilistore, which is an ok affiliate price comparison platform. I think there are a few things you could do to improve things if you’re willing to stick with it.

Here are some ideas:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

1. The first introduction to the theme of the site (DAB radios) is 700 pixels down the homepage. I’d put that right up top, e.g. changing your tagline “doing the searching so you don’t have to” to “We’ve found the best DAB Radios so you don’t have to”.

2. The homepage is largely taken up by a single graphic, which doesn’t really lead anywhere. I’d switch that to a smaller graphic, and link it through to the product page of the particular radio.

3. Product recommendations from 3 different sources are then crammed into a messy area at the bottom of the homepage (from amazon, an affiliate window content unit, and an affilistore content unit). I’d clean that area up & focus on one unit at a time. Figure out which works the best & stick with that until things are working.

4. A simple fix to your search box would be to change the text to ‘Search for DAB Radios here…’ instead of just ‘Search for products here…’

DEAD ENDS

The site is full of little dead ends. An easy way to get rid of these is to click through it asking yourself the question “if I was a visitor, would clicking that link have moved me closer to a purchase, or closer to abandoning the site?”

Here are 2 examples:

1. The top navigation is a series of 4 dead ends. Once a visitor clicks on any one of them, they are presented with a page that takes them away from purchasing anything, rather than toward it.

2. If you’re happy dabbling with the affilistore code, you may want to remove the ‘+ Add to my saved list’ and ‘Review this store’ and ‘Review this product’ links from category pages. These are red herrings that visitors won’t use, at the same time if anyone does click on them, the resulting pages are quite confusing.

PRODUCT SELECTION

On a site like this, the primary function is to help visitors move toward a product selection, and then to click through to the merchant site. Here are a few observations on how you could improve that:

1. The product selection is very broad. There are 17 categories, only 2 of them devoted to the products you’re trying to sell. (and those are buried in positions 15 & 16).

2. In your 2 target categories (‘Portable Radios’ & ‘Radios’), there are 900 products. It’s very difficult to dig through these and, other than brand and price, no reason to click on any one of them. The default sorting seems to be ‘low price to high’, meaning visitors are presented with really cheap radios & left to find anything decent themselves.

3. Your Brand categories are alphabetical, but crammed together with no line breaks. I’d separate those to 1 per line and add the words ‘DAB Radios’ to the end of each (‘Cowon DAB Radios’ rather than just ‘Cowon’ for example). That will look repetitive, but is more helpful to someone landing on the page for the first time, and better for search engine rankings.

COMPARISON PAGES

The pages that should convert for you are your individual product pages (comparing the price of an individual product at various merchants). Here’s an example page & some thoughts:

http://www.digioutput.co.uk/product/7/16893/Pure-One-Mini-Black.html

1. The first ‘add to cart’ button on your product pages is *way* down the page. (off screen if you’re browsing on my laptop – in fact the first price is off the screen).

2. The top product is the one you’re trying to get the visitor to click through on, yet there’s nothing to indicate that. Putting it in a box with ‘Our Recommendation’ (or similar) is a very easy way to present them with a logical next click.

3. The alternate products are presented as ‘similar products’

4. While I like affilistore, I think you have to spell out to visitors what’s going on with each page. On the product page. Heading a product page up with “We’ve found 8 products that match ‘Magicbox Dab Kitchen Radio’ – check out our recommendations below” helps them understand what’s going on.

PATIENCE

Finally, I think perhaps the biggest problem with the site was patience. It looks like you gave up on the site a little early. There are 5 or 6 news items & then it’s been abandoned. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as perhaps you found something more successful & put your efforts into that – but I’d have given it a bit more time & think you could still make it work pretty easily.

I hope that helps – good luck!

“In your recent surgery review for Envirogadget, you mentioned selling advertising space, and developing a media pack.

Would you recommend site owners do this themselves or host the ads through one of the ad networks? And is there a ‘standard’ way to present a media pack?

Thanks guys, brilliant site, and really useful. May even pluck up the courage up ask for advice on my site one day…!”

Lammo

Hi Andy

Without a doubt you should be able to put a media pack together yourself – don’t be frightened by the term … basically potential advertisers want to know the answer to two questions:

What type of person typically visits your site?
And how many of them do you reach?

Of course you will have loads of different stats that will enable you to show off your sites benefits, but be sure to answer those two questions, and you’ll keep advertisers happy.

Take a look at what the London Evening Standard do: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/home/article-21640121-abc-figures-and-demographics.do. Very basic, and to the point, but it answers those two key questions, and if you were looking to target up to 1.7m web-savvy, stylish Londoners who earn more than £40,000 a year, you’d be happy to advertise with them! If you’re looking to get a few more people into your pound shop in Peckham, then you probably wouldn’t see the LES as a good match.

You don’t have to include prices, although advertisers are likely to ask – it’s worth striking up the conversation to see if your site is a match for the advertiser – if so, then you should be able to work out a deal between you!

Clarke

I would recommend you do both, or at least have the option to do it.

Get a media pack, look at what other sites in your sector are doing, and base yours off of established sites, but please don’t just copy them. In general, folk want to know your reach and the type of people looking at your site, who has placed adverts before (if any) and what your rate prices are. Typically, most people won’t want to pay your asking price if you are not booked out all the time. What you should do is advertise that you have advert space for sale, and if you find that you have not sold any adverts, simply backfill with adverts from Ad Networks. Try a few out to find out what works best for you.

“My wordpress site www.proteinshake.org.uk targets the keywords protein shake/s, protein bars, protein powder.  The website converts ok, not great but not bad either.  Some merchants convert around 5% or so, but this varies alot.  Lately the site has only been getting around 13-15 unique visitors per day and it should be performing much better than this.

The site has a fair amount of content and used to rank well for the plural and singular, but roughly 2 months ago it only ranked for the keyword ‘protein shake’.  I feel it should be ranking for alot more terms and in a higher position.

The site has a PR of 2 and a few backlinks.  Very few of the backlinks are for the secondary and third keywords, the majority are for ‘protein shake’ or ‘protein shakes’.”

What I would like to know is why you think the site is under performing so much in the SERPS?

Thank you for taking the time to review my site :)”

Here’s what Dan, Kier and Elaine had to say:

Dan

Hi, Richard, how are you?

Congratulations on the site – it’s a great niche and should bring you money for years to come!

Here are 3 quick tips that I think will help you:

TIP ONE: Tighten up your keyword/page targeting

Your homepage title tag right now is:

“Protein Shake | Protein Bars | Protein Shakes | Protein Powder – proteinshake.org.uk”

In other words, you’re trying to get the homepage to rank for:

• Protein Shake
• Protein Shakes
• Protein Bars
• Protein Powder

Instead, I’d reduce your homepage title tag to simply:

“Protein Shake | Protein Shakes – proteinshake.org.uk”

Here’s why I’d do that:

1) You rank really well for ‘Protein Shake’, but you could improve the rank for ‘Protein Shakes’.  Tightening the targeting of the homepage to focus on those 2 terms only could easily bump you up for ‘protein shakes’ (which seems to be the higher volume term).

2) You already have other pages on the site targeting ‘Protein Bars’ & ‘Protein Powder’ respectively.  Therefore, by targeting those with the homepage, you’ve got 2 pages fighting to try and rank for each term.  Stop targeting those terms from the homepage and make sure their individual pages work as landing pages for each term.

TIP TWO: Gather backlinks for your secondary terms

Once you’ve stopped trying to rank the homepage for your secondary terms, you can concentrate on building a few links direct to their pages, with relevant anchor text.  Concentrate on each as if it’s a homepage for the term.

TIP THREE: Use Your Competitors

Without being spammy… if I search for ‘Protein Shakes’, the 3 sites that rank above you right now are all user generated.  It feels like it would be very easy to put together a useful article ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Protein Shakes’, and to post that – quite helpfully and honestly – to each of those forum threads.

It looks like the Yahoo one is now closed, but Google is placing the latest related Yahoo Answers directly underneath it.  It would be very easy to set up a google alert for any topics from Yahoo Answers, Mens Health Forums, or PP Online that mention ‘protein shakes’ and to post a link there if appropriate.

Incidentally – I notice Mens Health Forums also ranks first for ‘protein bars’ and the last post on the thread looks suspiciously like it’s been posted by someone from myprotein.co.uk.

I hope this is useful.

Good luck with it, Richard.

Dan

Kier

Hi Richard.

You’re ranking well for your main keywords but not so much for others.  Identify those that you want to be ranking well for (use Google’s keyword tool to see search volumes) and start working on it.  Add more pages of content optimised for those phrases and build links with them in the anchor text.  You know it’s worked well for your main phrase so repeat the process for others.

As you state yourself your back links are mainly with ‘protein shake’ as the anchor text rather than the others, you just need to rectify this by getting more links and building more relevant content.

Elaine

I’m not certain, but it could be a perceived keyword stuffing penalty and internal linking with the same anchor text – ‘protein’.  Google does seem to have taken a harsher stand against this recently and I’ve had to cull some of my keywords and think of different descriptions and synonyms – sometimes less is more at the moment.

Might be worth a try.

“I have just had my website re-designed and this went live last Friday.  Previous to that I had an off-the-shelf template website from EKM Powershop.  I must now wait for the SEO the designer has done as part of the new website to start working which I know can take several weeks.  However, I already had SEO in place on the previous website, but now when I check certain keywords in Google I’m appearing in some reasonable positions, but when clicking on them it says the web page is not available as obviously this is relating to the old website.  Is there anything that can be done?  It seems a shame to have actually gained some reasonable places by virtue of the SEO I did with EKM to now start at the beginning again.”

Dan

Hi, Janice, how are you?

I don’t think this is really an affiliate question, but here are some notes that I hope will help you.  I’m going to tackle it in 3 parts and I’m also going to assume that your domain name hasn’t changed.

Here are the 3 parts of my answer:

1) What you’d do if you were going to fix this problem
2) Why I wouldn’t bother in your case
3) What you should do instead!

WHAT YOU’D DO IF YOU WERE GOING TO FIX THE PROBLEM

The most straightforward fix would be to tell the search engines firstly that your pages have moved, and secondly where they’ve moved to.  The standard way of doing this is by using a ‘301 redirect’ for each page.

You’d generally do this using either ‘.htaccess’ or, in your case (as your site is database driven, on an apache server, with thousands of pages), a better option would be a ‘mod_rewrite’ rule.  Mod_rewrite is a little module that helps out your server, looking for certain formats of URL & translating them into your preferred format.  For example, if your old format was ‘/category/bathrooms’ and your new format is ‘/bathrooms.html’, you’d set up a rule to look for the word ‘/category…’ before mod_rewrite would work its magic, pass people to the correct pages, and notify everyone that this was a permanent change.  You’d do that rejigging your old style URLs to your new ones.

WHY I WOULDN’T BOTHER IN YOUR CASE

In your case though, it looks like the site only has a couple of links coming into it, and that all of the links are to your homepage anyway.  That’s good news, as it means there’s not a huge advantage to sorting out this problem with dead links (and so you need not worry about the complexities of mod_rewrite).

It’s bad news however, as inbound links are hugely important as far as search engines are concerned, and a lack of inbound links probably means you’re not getting very much traffic from search engines.

WHAT I’D DO INSTEAD OF FIXING YOUR URL ISSUE

Instead, I’d firstly start putting some effort into building links to the site, and secondly I’d fix some other little SEO issues on the site.

I won’t give you any linkbuilding tips here, as there are many ways to do that and it’s far removed from your question.  I do know that one of the other doctors has a very good linkbuilding service over at http://www.contentnow.co.uk/link-building.php though.

My gut instinct is that your new site could do with some big changes.  My gut instinct is often wrong though, so instead here are 3 quick on-site SEO Tips and 2 conversion tips:

1) Fix the Titles on your Category Pages

If you go to this page: http://www.divineinteriorsandgifts.com/Lamps_and_Lighting–c6.html, you’ll see that the page title is “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  There are hundreds of category pages on your site with that same title, all of which are very unlikely to rank anywhere in Google.  You should ask your web developer to fix those so that they’re relevant to the individual pages (in that case something like “Lamps and Lighting at Divine Interiors” – this could be automated for every page on the site with about 30 minutes work).  While they’re at it, it would be worth you asking them to put your page headings into ‘h1’ tags too.

2) Dot com or Dot co dot uk?

Google has latched onto your .com address, yet in your question you referenced the .co.uk address.  You can fix this by redirecting the.com to the .co.uk. (again your web company should be able to do this very easily).

3) Register with Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google would happily let you know about both of the problems above (and many more) if you signed up to their set of fantastic tools and notifications totally free (‘Google Webmaster Tools).  Visit www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, follow the instructions, and it will give you various bits of info and offer suggestions for improving your site.  A little sidenote is that you’ll probably have to fix the 404 page on your site in order to do this.  Again, your web developer should be able to do that.

4) Conversion Tip: Move your ‘Buy’ buttons

At the moment, the ‘buy’ buttons on your product pages are miles away from the product image, price and stock information.  They’re also in the same colour as all of the other buttons on the site.  I promise you that if you move them nearer the price and change their colour to contrast with the rest of the site, they’ll do better.

5) Conversion Tip: Fix your cart process

When I hit the ‘buy’ button, it’s taking me to a cart page with a link that says ‘Confirm’.  That’s fine, though perhaps ‘Check Out Now’ or something would be better.  But the rest of the cart process is a real struggle to get through.  I’d recommend that you go through this yourself, pretending you’re a first time buyer and then hassle your web people to fix the painful bits.

Semi-finally… there are plenty more little fixes, and bigger fixes, that could help out your site, but I’ve already gone on forever here.  Feel free to get in touch if you want more.

Completely-finally… your site isn’t an affiliate site, but you could benefit from setting up an affiliate program.  A few of the other doctors could help you out with this so do add a comment if you’re interested.

I hope at least something there helps.

Dan.

Clarke

Redirect the pages that are ranking to the new versions via 301 redirects.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than losing the visitor to a 404 error page.  Your 404 error page is the same as your homepage at the time of review, and that’s going to cause you issues with Google unless of course the server is correctly telling Google it’s a 404 page and it should ignore the content.  Either way, it’s a bad idea to have any 404 showing, check your logs and 301 redirect the links to another page and or front of the site.  Less than ideal but not the end of the world, you have a sitemap in place, and would imagine that Google knows about it, so it should be a case of just waiting for the new pages take effect, but the time can vary on when this will happen in full.

What you should have done where possible is to re-use the same URLs and site structure, unless of course it was not SEO friendly in the 1st place.  Keeping the same page titles during a swap to a new layout and design can help when it comes to not losing rank on the pages that do rank, you can then slowly edit them over time.  I have noticed in the past that any complete shift in site URL structure and page titles leads Google to treating the site like it hasn’t seen it before, and not always a bad thing.  Sometimes you need to take short term pain for the longer term gains the new site structure, page layout and SEO can bring.

By the way, each of your sections in the product menu has the page title “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  This must be killing you on the SEO front; I would advise you get each title renamed to reflect the products sold in each section.  You also have no description meta-tag for each of your products, again not great for SEO.

Elaine

Your web designer should have used 301 (permanent) redirects on your site.  This is to tell all the search engines that a particular page is no longer available and automatically directs them to the new page.  Here’s some more information, 301 redirect, but your web designer should already know how to do this.
 

Kirsty

Well, if I were you and if the pages that have been 404-ing have counterparts on the new site version, I’d be pulling on my big tackety boots and asking the developer if they wouldn’t mind just bending over and giving me a minute or two to take a good run up.

It’s an easy job for a developer to set up redirects from old page versions to new ones to ensure a smooth transfer for your new site version in the serps. 

Even if there are some pages which didn’t have counterparts in the old site version, your developer should have anticipated 404s and set up a nice looking custom 404 page to help your site visitors find their way around.  

Kier

Hi Janice.

If I understand you correctly the issue you’re having is that with the site change, URLs from the old site are still showing up in Google but aren’t leading anywhere as the URL structure has changed.  To remedy this you need to use what’s called a 301 redirect for all the old URLs and have them redirect to the most relevant page on the new site structure.  You can find more info here.

Editors Note

Hi Janice.  Thanks for sending in your site for review, and apologies for taking so long to get it published.  It’s a very nice looking site overall and fits well with the product offering you have.  However, aside from the Docs reviews, I also noticed that you have a Twitter account associated with the site, although it doesn’t look like you’ve been very active with it since setting up.  You would definitely benefit from putting a little effort into this direction to pull in some targeted traffic to your website.  Without going into all the ins and outs of twitter, take a look at the following two articles by Kieron and Clarke on how to use twitter to grow your business and some general twitter advice and tips.  Kieron has used twitter to great effect in building and promoting his large userbase for ShareMyPlayLists.com.

With that said, they planned to promote the service via the affiliate channel and wanted to pick the docs brains as to where the best place would be to advertise the scheme.  Commission was set at £30 for each sale, paid directly into a PayPal account, with monthly affiliate prizes of £3,000 to the affiliate generating the most sales.

Unfortunately, when when the docs came to review the site, it was down, and only one doc got review the live site; it hasn’t appeared since.  Although the site is no longer, I thought it would still be of benefit to publish the docs reviews on how they would go about promoting a new affiliate scheme.

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Kier

Hi David.

The least time intensive method to get affiliates is to join a network.  Going the in-house route can work well too, but you’ll need plenty of time to devote to recruiting the affiliates and keeping them paid and happy.  The quickest way to find relevant affiliates is just to head to Google and try some searches for terms you’d like to appear on and see where you can find affiliate sites and then contact them.  For instance I’d try stuff like ‘hosting reviews’, ‘cheap wordpress hosting’ etc..  As things stand though, I think you may struggle to find productive affiliates, the market for hosting is very tough and there are a lot of good affiliate programs for hosting out there, I’m not sure your offering is particularly competitive.

Mark

Hi David.

Thanks for submitting your enquiry to the Doctors, and I hope the following will help you understand what you need to do to promote your affiliate campaign.

If you want to promote your affiliate campaign on your own platform, then I would suggest that you spend time targeting relevant people to promote your campaign, and contact people directly to inform them of your campaign.

You could also use some of the affiliate marketing forums to communicate information about your campaign, but please be careful when submitting things onto forums about your campaign and ensure that you submit them in the relevant place – don’t spam.

You could also consider using an affiliate network to track the sales and have the benefit of the reach that an affiliate network will have to relevant affiliates already.  You would need to pay for this, but as a rule of thumb you would pay a set-up fee, a monthly fee and an override on the commission you pay to affiliates, so you are best to contact more than one affiliate network about your campaign offering.

I would also edge on the side of caution when trying to use affiliate marketing for Business to Business propositions as there are a limited number of affiliates that are strong in this space.  I would also make sure that you ask the network about that before working with them, and maybe consider asking a few affiliates on forums about their experience with these networks for your products.

I hope this is useful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Clarke

Hi David.

As I can’t see the website to read up on the services you’re offering I won’t be able to give you any feedback, so I will address the how to promote it via affiliates part of your question.  The best places to advertise affiliate opportunities is the A4U Forum, affiliate blogs, your own Twitter account and by contacting affiliates directly.

A4U Forum

You’re free to make a post but can speak to Matt’s team with regards to placement of an onsite advert and the Affiliate Solus email opportunities.

Affiliate Blogs

These are a fantastic place to advertise affiliate opportunities as they tend to have the more engaged affiliates reading, the ones that want to learn more and stay up to date with what affiliates in the know have to say.  Plus I dare say if you’re an onsite advertiser, you could probably approach them with your press release or even a free demo account and get a free write up, but be warned, you can’t pay affiliates to write good things about you, so you will need to accept that if they review your service, they will say what they like as well as what they don’t like about it.

Twitter, is a great marketing tool that’s still being overlooked.  Granted, there are a lot more people on Twitter these days, but you will be surprised how it’s brushed off by people who are not feeling the Twitter love.  Get an account, get following the Twitter lists of the affiliates in the UK, start interacting and most of all, post information about what you do and why affiliates should check it out etc..

Contacting Affiliates Directly

This is hard work with a small percentage success rate of affiliates actually replying to emails out of the blue.  First, I would take a look at the types of affiliates you’re after, then make a list and contact them and use whatever means you can, be it email, phone, letter, Twitter etc., but please don’t spam them all.  By this I mean really look in to each one and don’t just grab the first email you can find and send a generic ‘send to all’ message; that’s got very little chance of working.

“I run a web development company, Anoveta, and although it’s not an affiliate site I don’t have much experience in SEO beyond the basics of the on-page stuff.  I’m looking for some general suggestions as to how the site could be improved.

I’ve recently changed the design on the site and it seems to be getting between 10 and 30 uniques a day, but I’ve only had one conversion from it in the last month, so I’d appreciate any advice on how to improve that.”

Here’s what the docs had to say …

Jay

Who is your target market?  What is your USP?  If you can answer both those questions you should get a few ideas as to how to portray that and further improve your site.

From an SEO point of view, it would make sense if you could hone your target market in order to choose keywords.  Do you have a geographical area that you wish to target?  If so you might consider ‘web design Durham’ or ‘web development Durham’ as your target keywords and ensure you have a page named after this on the site.  This will narrow the number of websites you are competing against in SERPs (as opposed to the entire of the North East of England) and might also give you a local appeal.  You’ve got a great link from a well trusted domain, dur.ac.uk (a Durham-based site, so great context for targeting Durham) thanks to your previous work – and you’ve used great anchor text so keep up the good work there.

I’d also recommend targeting the homepage to catch your ideal client’s eye.  For example, the ‘hero image’ on your homepage is of a girl in a field.  Perhaps this could be a snapshot or scrolling gallery of your work, linking through to your portfolio page.  If that doesn’t appeal, an image of a successful small business owner could also work; someone who looks very happy with their website and has a booming business as a result!  It’s a cliché, but clichés work.

At every step of your site design, ask yourself what route you want your website’s visitors to take.  In your case, keep suggesting to the viewer that they should find your contact details, and now, through obvious buttons and text.  Oh, and keep all contact details and calls to action above the fold!  Simple technique, but it’s proven to work wonders.  I expect your portfolio page is probably one of the most visited too – it’s how web design is normally sold to a prospect – so make sure that it’s easy to get to and digest.

In order to get visitors to act as fast as possible, perhaps sell web design to them through how it’s the perfect timing in the current economic climate to be thinking about marketing (i.e. web design).  Or you could have a time sensitive offer, or promote festive web development examples that you have.  You just need to keep answering your visitors’ questions at every turn: “what’s in it for me?”, “why should I contact you rather than the next person?”.  If you can do that, combined with a bit of SEO, you should have a steady flow of traffic to a well-converting site.  Don’t forget to let a bit of personality shine through – some character makes you more human and approachable and can actually form part of your USP.  You could do that through a blog or news section – great for SEO!

Clarke

Hi James.

5 headliners for you “Content, Title Tags, Links, Links, Links”.

I see your site is built on WordPress so that’s cool, it’s going to make things a lot easier.  So before I talk about the “5 headliners”, let’s get some of the basics that I would do if it was me.  Others will have their own view on what plug-ins they like better, but I can only tell you what I have used and what has worked for me.

You have no site map from what I can see, so who’s pinging Google with your site changes and all the pages that can be found on your site?   Sure, Google and pals are great for crawling the web, but they have site maps to help them do it better, so get the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug-in.

I see you have a SEO plug-in called “Platinum SEO Pack”; can’t comment on it, but I have a feeling it’s not as good as “All in One SEO Pack”.  Personally I would remove the other and get that one instead, but it’s your choice.

Content

OK … on to the content, and by this, I mean what you have on page and what you have in your meta-descriptions.  I am not the worlds best at copy (a wordsmith I am not!) but your own page copy seems alright.  Try and make sure you that you have keywords you want to rank for peppered across the site (not stuffed, but at least included once or twice in the site copy).  You’re not going to be in the top 10 for “Web Development”, “Web Design” or “UK Website Hosting” so stop trying.  Instead, go more local like “Durham Web Development” or whatever areas you’re after.  Sure, we all want work from all over the place, but honestly, you would do better finding a large local area to be number 1 on first before you go national.  Use the H1 etc. tags to your advantage, get your keywords to stand out, but don’t over do it.  Your meta-descriptions are boring, no one is going to read them and think, “Hey should click this link”.  It’s a pain to do, but if you can craft all your meta-descriptions per page as if you were paying £1 a click for someone reading the text, then you’ll get a much higher click through rate.  Something I need to do more of myself.

Title Tags

Title Tags are so important, and yours I am afraid are shocking.  I suspect it’s the “SEO” plug in that’s doing the work, but why on earth it’s using a non-standard dot thing as a separator is beyond me.  Use a “-“ or “|”, or even a “,” or “.” is ok, but personally I use “-“ or “|” when I separate my words.

“Web Development, Web Design, UK Website Hosting • Anoveta” is your main page title tag, so that’s clearly all of your important words as the rest of the pages have nothing!  Instead I would have a page for each of your main areas and customise the title to that page and go longer tail; you will not be top 10 for “Web Design”, so go for something like “Durham Web Design”.  You should be able to get in to the top 5 for that with a little work.

Links, Link, Links

Links, Links, Links.  So we are clear, all the on page optimisation is a complete waste of time if you don’t get links.  You should do it to give you an edge over people going for the same keywords, and indeed, if your on page stuff is good, you might not need many links – but you still need links.  You need links to your main page and you need links to your key pages inside your site.

OK … so on to the good news.  You have designed a site for a college; way hey!, happy days you can get free .ac.uk links back to your site   The problem is you have targeted ‘keyword links’ back to your site.  There’s nothing really wrong with that other than that the main page you link to contains the mixed message page of “I don’t know what I want to rank for”, yet your keyword link back clearly says you want to rank for “Durham Web Development”.  Why don’t you have that in your title tag, your meta description and text on your main page if it’s important?  So fix that and it will do wonders, but don’t forget to get more links.

By the way, have you researched if that’s even the right keyword you want to go for?  Do more people type in “Durham Web Development” or “Durham Web Design”?  You should look in to that using your logs and tools like Google Adwords Keyword Generator.

Last bit of advice, always try and get links back from work you have done for clients, however be aware, as if you were doing work for the likes of me, I would have already told you up front I am paying you for the design, without credits, because I am a control freak as to where I link to LOL, so expect that from time to time; a jobs a job

Elaine

Hi James – the first thing I look for when I’m interested in a product or service is some indication of the price, which I think is important for prospective customers, especially those who may only want a very simple, entry site, at the moment it seems that you’re mainly looking for larger projects – you could be missing out here.

I also found the site a tad technical, it might be helpful if you had a glossary section which explained everything in simple, layman’s terms – and I mean everything, we do forget that 90% of the population have no idea when it comes to the internet, phrases such as web hosting, e-commerce websites, customer management systems etc..

I’m also surprised there’s no mention of SEO and if/how you can help them create a presence on the web – organic and PPC options – another area that most folk find totally confusing.

I’d hurry up and finish the portfolio page, this is probably not helping, it does look very sparse – I’d consider removing it until you had a wider selection to showcase.

I’d simply make it more simpler, let prospective customers know exactly what you can do for them, and some indication of price, especially for the lower end.

Good Luck.

Kier

Hi James

First thing I’d do is make your call to action more explicit, for instance instead of saying ‘get in touch’, have it say ‘Call or email us now for a quote!’ and move this from the bottom right corner to somewhere much more visible such as the top left.  Your navigation also feels a bit oddly placed, maybe consider moving this to the left hand column or another more common placing.

There’s so many things you could tweak really, my main piece of advice would be to get Google Site Optimiser on there and start running tests, and always treat the site as a work in progress, not something to have a ‘redesign’ every year or so.  I’d strongly recommend you read Google Website Optimiser 101, it’s a fantastic article from the guys at Conversion Rate Experts and should give you plenty of inspiration for improving not only your site but any future sites you build for clients.

“Whenever I’ve developed a new website, or had one developed for me, I’ve either left it to obtain traffic purely through search engines, cross promoted it via newsletter subscribers of my other websites, or headed straight down the PPC route.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be launching three new websites that aim to do what they say on the tin, nothing more, nothing less – Buy Cheap Books.  This time however, I am stumped as to how best to promote them and would welcome any suggestions people may have.”

The sites are:

Buy Cheap Books (live)
Buy Cheap Films (now live, but wasn’t at the time of review)
Buy Cheap Music (coming soon)

Here’s what some of the Doctors had to say…

Elaine

That’s a great easy to use site, which I think is it’s main attraction.  I think I’d be tempted to contact as many book related forums, book clubs, women’s interest groups and ask for feedback and offer a free prize draw for those who respond.

I’d also try doing a competition for some free books, I used to do this with Allkids in the early days, and usually got a great response – just ensure they have to visit the site to get the answer – ask them to forecast the next weeks/months top 5 books to win them – that way you’ll probably get only those who are interested in reading!

Send some books to relevant bloggers – they don’t come much cheaper than that, and ask for a review.

Good luck with the site Chris.

Lammo

Hiya Frostie, How about running competitions?

Let’s say you stump up for a first edition book by John Grisham… (A First Edition of his first novel will set you back around $150)… Then give that away as a prize with a qualifying question into the draw:

“What is the name of the lead character in Grisham’s latest legal thriller ‘The Associate’?” (together with a link to your sales page for this book where they can find the answer from the spiel and maybe buy the book if they like).

Make sure you capture their email address, and on the “thanks for entering” page, link to all the John Grisham books they can buy.  You’re going to get two things out of this: Lots of traffic and links from the competition and freebie sites (you should of course link back to them as a thank you), and a fairly large mailing list of people who like John Grisham books who you can email every time he brings out a new book, with your link to pre-order (as well as perhaps putting them in a “crime/legal thriller” mailing list once a month/fortnight/week.. all with their opt-in permission of course).

If you find this works, then simply repeat with different authors/genres etc.. and of course that can work for the Films (signed memorabilia from the actors/directors) and Music (gig tickets, signed albums from each artist) sites too – Just rinse and repeat!

Dan

Hiya Chris

I like the site you’ve launched.  Good luck with the others!  Here are 10 ideas – I hope at least one’s useful.

Short-term promotion ideas:

1. Send a book to each of your blogger friends & cheekily ask for a link/site review.  Could be a funny book related to them, could be something they’d like, etc.
2. Send 5 questions to a bunch of high profile authors/actors/musicians, publish them as interviews, & promote the interviews (e.g. on facebook/twitter, link to them from wikipedia, email their fan club, etc.).
3. You have twitter/facebook/delicious icons on there, but they feel like an afterthought.  Encourage people to post ‘I’m about to buy [….] via http://bit.ly/cheapbooks !’ to their various profiles.
4. Post a question to a site that’s read by a bunch of people in the affiliate industry

Medium-term promotion ideas:

5. Build widgets around popular books/films (e.g. the usual ‘Which character are you?’ widget)
6. Run a series of competitions.  For example, ‘design your own poster for the new Twilight film’.  Use a good prize, ask a bunch of ‘twilight’ bloggers to judge the competition (hence they’ll all blog about you multiple times), post the entries to flickr, etc.
7. Slightly odd idea: Try hiding the merchant info of the cheapest price when someone searches.  Include an ‘email me this price’ button.  Get a newsletter signup in return (& have an ‘email to a friend’ option?).  Lastminute sort of vaguely do something similar with their “This hotel owner won’t let us publish their name they’re so cheap!” thing.

Long-term promotion ideas:

8. Donate x% of your profit to ‘Book Aid’, make a point of this, ask for links to help you, ask for book aid to promote you.  You could even extend this to other charities.  Rev share with the charities for the traffic they provide?
9. Allow readers/listeners/etc. to stick up their own fan pages on your site?  Give them a cut for doing so? (a la squidoo)
10. Set up your own affiliate scheme.  A version of ‘Amazon Associates’, allowing other people to promote buying individual books, films, music, etc. via your site (worked well for Amazon after all!)

Hope something there helps!

Dan

Editors note – It’s interesting to see that all three Doctors are singing from the same page (excuse the pun) about running competitions – we didn’t compare notes honest!  Everyone has their own take on it though, so lots of different ideas for you there Frostie – hopefully plenty you can run with – Please keep us updated with how the sites progress!