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November 16, 2006

Building a Professional Affiliate Site, Looking Back

Posted by Adam Viener

In March, I write a popular Blog entry entitled "5 Easy Steps for Building a Professional Affiliate Site" where I went through a step by step approach on how I build the site Language-Learning-Software.com to promote Rosetta Stone's Affiliate Program.

Today, Art, left me a great comment asking me how things were going with the site since March of 2006. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go back and really take a look at how the site has progressed and what things you did during that time to promote the site and try to continue to make it successful.

Since I shared the story of the site's creation, I feel it's only fair to share some of the results (good and bad ) and interesting things I did and lessons learned so that you might be able to take some interesting takeaways for your own affiliate sites.

Paid Search:
I created a paid search campaign promoting learning Spanish and learning French and linked those campaigns to the corresponding pages. Unfortunately the costs per click out paced the conversion rates, so I lost some money with the test. I would estimate a loss of a couple hundred dollars. This test showed me that the conversion rates were not very good, and that I will need to re-consider the design of the site, and or the promotional copy to better turn visitors into buyers.

Additionally, with the recent quality score changes, the prices Google wanted was even higher, so I have pretty much stopped paid search for this specific site.

Language Translation:
An article from Joel Comm turned me on to a little language translation script called Translation Gold (Link through Joel Comm in appreciation for his turning me on to it, Thanks Joel!) It was easy to add this script to my site, and with a click of a button it translates my pages into 9 major languages. I thought this would be great for a site basically helping people learn different languages. I added that tool in August, and now most of my top referring sites are from overseas, and my top referring keyword is something my browser doesn't translate, I think it's Chinese! What a wonderful world!

Expiring Domains
Since I was looking for organic traffic, I decided to explore some direct type in traffic as well, I did some research on soon to be expiring domain names that had the names of the languages I was promoting in them and came across the domain "chineseso.com". I ran the domain through Mozzel's Domain Name Pro software and identified that it has a few decent inbound links, so I acquired the domain in October after it expired for $60 through a SnapNames auction and setup a 301 redirect to the learn to speak Chinese page of the site.

Today when I was going back to see how the site was doing, I saw a HUGE discrepancy between the reported page views in Google Analytics vs. my hosting providers analytics program. I ran an error page report and figured out that my 301 redirect wasn't setup perfectly. I was trying to direct all the traffic to a specific page using the following command in the .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 / http://www.language-learning-software.com/learn_to_speak_chinese.html

I had assumed that this command would redirect ALL incoming pages to that specific url, but a closer look at my logs indicated that it was adding on the extra page names at the end creating page like language-learning-software.com/learn_to_speak_chinese.htmldvbbs/. One page had over 202,722 error pages in October alone! So initially I went back in and added a ? to the end of my redirect argument so the page would be chineses.html?dvdbbs and that seemed to work, but then I decided to look a little deeper. If this domain is driving that much traffic, let's take a closer look.

Utilizing Archive.org and Google's translation tools, I discovered that I had acquired a domain that used to be used for the Mainland Undergraduate Association website. Since the site is in Chinese, I decided to link the traffic to the Chinese version of my home page, kindly provided by Translation Gold. Now the traffic should be going the site instead of error pages. I also added the following argument to my .htaccess file to make sure I capture any future error pages:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.language-learning-software.com/chinese.php?u=http://www.language-learning-software.com/index.html?

I will probably watch the traffic and conversions for another month, and if that huge amount of traffic doesn't turn into conversions, I will start exploring other alternatives for the high traffic domain I acquired. Clearly it's worth a lot more than the $60 I paid for it!

I would love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Adam