Still at it...

I sat down to work on my affiliate site yesterday, with the intention of updating all of my product pages and working on an outline for a new template. I ended up getting a template done completely, and also setting up a mailing list for the site - and I'm still knee deep in updates and additions today!

Up until now, I didnt have a newsletter set up for this site. In fact, I wasnt sure if I wanted to set one up at all as this site's purpose is to generate passive income - - and I quite honestly want to do as little work on it as possible. The goal is to gain free traffic from search engine listings and send visitors directly to the merchant from my product listings.

That said, the site has been doing so well lately that I have decided to put a bit more energy into this one and really take it up a few notches. Still, I dont want to be committed to a weekly newsletter - or even a monthly mailing, as that ties me to my computer in order to keep it rolling.

What I decided instead was that I would use the HTML/RSS features at aWeber (my mailing list/autoresponder manager) to create a "Product Feed" that people could also subscribe to via Email (in addition to RSS or My Yahoo! subscriptions). Basically I will pre-populate the messages for 6 months to a year - like you would an autoresponder - and post date them to go out automatically. Those who are subscribed via email will receive them in their Inbox, and the same messages will post to the RSS Feed automatically at the same time. I can then pull that feed in using CaRP to display an archive on the site... so the "list" will serve multiple purposes.

I am also adding the "rel=nofollow" tag to my outgoing affiliate links throughout the site, double checking my cloaking on each page, adding Adsense back in via SSI and working on setting up the XML Site Map through Google.

It's quite a re-do for this particular site (which was very plain to begin with) but intially I didnt want to invest a lot of time and energy into it until I got an idea of how well it might do. It showing a lot of potential... so it's definitely time to work it up a bit!