How I Got Rich

Well being a full-time affiliate again didn’t last long.  Less than a week later I have a new job but will be working full-time not part-time like before.  This means my time for affiliate marketing will be greatly reduced.  I wasn’t looking for work but something landed in my lap and was offered ito me and I am not in a position to turn work down so I will be starting next week.

Maybe this will spur me on and give me an incentive to put more effort into my affiliate marketing sites.  I must admit I had been getting lazy.  Around my previous job in England I still managed to put in quite a bit of effort into affiliate stuff and got to a level of earnings I have yet to go above (apart from Christmas) after trying affiliate marketing full-time for the past few months.

I’m setting myself the goal of writing four new product review pages/posts a day to one of my existing sites (rotating through the sites) and also adding one new product review page to each of my two big sites.

With the extra money coming in I will be reinvesting some of my profits from Internet marketing into my sites by buying content and looking into link building and how much that costs.  Anyone know any thing about that?

My long term goal is still to get from my current earnings of about 400 pound a month to 2,000 a month by the end of 2010.  Will I be able to do it?

After a recent post in the smingle thread on the a4u forum which recommended a domain name and gave a projected monthly income of around 150 a month if you got that site to number one in Google I decided to have a look at my sites and see how they performed each month financially.

It was pretty depressing reading.

I used the tracking IDs in Amazon Associates of which I create a new one for each site and then looked at the monthly reports.  Out of my 30 or sites only one was earning more than 50 a month (and only during a certain season).  The rest were bringing in around 5-20 a month.  Some make a few sales via Affiliate Window but not more than they do via Amazon.  I do have  a couple of micro niche sites which looks like are my biggest earners and they are promoted via PPC but are still not bringing in anything to write home about.

According to the information given in the smingle thread my domains and sites all sound  good in theory:

• Keywords with 8,000 – 20,000 exact local matches a month (sometimes more)
• Products that retail between 10 and 100 (more on some sites)
• Easy to navigate sites with product reviews and price comparison ECUs where relevant
• At number in one Google for their main keyword

But even with all that they are just not getting the traffic or bringing home the bacon.

A few people have advised me to find my best site and develop it further and to continue doing what I am doing as it working but I don’t really have a best site and what I am doing is too big to keep doing i.e. too many small sites not making much money and taking too much time to keep track of and up to date.

To make this year a success I need to shake it up a bit and try something new…

I’ve had quite a productive day today.  This morning I wrote a few new pages of content for one of my old sites that was languishing  around page three in Google for ages and since I moved it to Wordpress has crawled up to the bottom of page one.  I’ve slowly been adding more posts to it to help improve it’s ranking.  There has been no change as of yet but I hope soon it will move up to the top.  Its more of a seasonal site for the autumn but it can’t do any harm getting it to the top now.  According to the Google KeyWord Tool it got 18,100 exact local searches last month so hopefully a few of them will click through if I get it higher up the page.  At the moment it gets about 100-200 uniques a month and makes a few sales.  Its never going to make me rich but as I’ve already bought the domain I might as well use it and see if I can make a few quid from it.

Ranking for Two Keywords

Regarding the above site I would ideally like to get it ranking for two keywords.  One is, lets say, red monkeys and the other is big footballs.  The product I am promoting does both things but has two different names that is referred to.  The domain I have used is redmonkeys.org.uk and the site is on the first page for that term but for the keyword big footballs the site is nowhere to be seen.  I’m not sure the best way to go about getting the site ranked for the other keyword.  I’m starting to build backlinks using that keyword as anchor text and I’ve started using the keyword more throughout the website so hopefully things should pick up.

If I focus on getting the site ranked for big footballs is there any way it will affect the ranking already achieved for red monkeys?

Another thing I did today was add a new product (well the first product) to my ‘big site’ and setup a PPC campaign for it.  Hopefully I get lucky with this product and start to see some sales come though.  My aim is to add one new product to this site per day and set up a PPC campaign for it.

I have now finished my part-time contract I was on and am now back to being a full-time Internet marketer again.  I will be looking for a new job (hopefully part-time) as I am still earning bugger all from this lark but hopefully before I find one my fortunes will pick up.

Last month was amazing but this month has been back to normal and I think I will be lucky to clear £400 which is nowhere near enough.

I am starting to wonder at what point do you call it quits and admit that something isn’t going to work out for you and move onto something else?  I guess if I have another month without any rise in profits then I will have to have a long hard look at where I am.

I read something just now in Kirty’s blog which has inspired me to set myself a new challenge.  Kirsty mentioned that she sets herself the target of writing eight pages a day and aims to do so  in two hours.  Later on she says each page is about 250 words.

After reading that I have decided to set myself the same target.  Each day I will write 8 new pages for my existing sites (of which I have many).  I will aim to do it in two hours but will give myself longer if need be.  Each page will most likely be a Wordpress post with an image of the product a link to the merchant and an ECU where appropriate.  Each post should be about 150-250 words.

Two hours isn’t long and I will spend the rest of my time working on other aspects of my sties including link building, finding new products or anything else I can think of.

Right, I better get off and start writing!

After such a great month in December 2010 has got off to a demotivating-ly slow start.  I left most of my PPC campaigns running that did so well in December but they hardly get any impressions and very little clicks and even less sales so I have stopped them.  Other sales have been pretty slow too.

Its hard to get motivated when things take a turn for the worse even though it was expected after the Christmas rush.  I looked at my array of sites and can’t really pick a winner out of them to focus on.  Some make a fair few sales but they are of low cost items whilst others make little sales but they are of higher priced items getting more of a good amount of commission.  None of them really stand out and look like they could be scaled up to bring in more money.  Most are ranked well but still don’t get much action.

I’ve just bought a new domain for a popular and competitive niche that I am temped to solely focus on for a month or so and try and get a good, big site up but what if it never outranks the big boys and I just waste my time?

Should I just focus on what I have already and try and get all my little sites up to date and firing on all cylinders?

How do you stay motivated when things slow down?

I didn’t much like Wordpress when I first started out in this game of affiliate marketing.  I thought it was too restrictive on what you could post, the themes weren’t that great and it seemed like a bit of an overkill for a small niche landing page.  As my dreams of being a web design were never realised building affiliate marketing sites using HTML and CSS gave me an opportunity to indulge my creative tendencies.  Due to all this I decided Wordpress wasn’t for me and I would build my own sites.

But as time went on I kept reading about how Google loved blogs and Wordpress blogs in-particular and how well they ranked and were easy to update and customise.  After a while I decided to try Wordpress on a few sites.  Besides, my web hosts, Hostgator, gave me access to cPanel and Fantastico which made installing Wordpress a breeze.  I installed Wordpress, picked a free theme that looked nice and started building my site.  It took me a while to work out the best way to setup the site including how to use the tags and categories in the best way, how to organise the posts and pages and which plug-ins to use.  But once my sites had been up and running for a while I noticed they started to rank quite well.  Once I had seen this for myself I started putting more effort into understanding Wordpress and soon after I started work on my own theme.  I found a blank theme that I could modify and shortly after I had my first Wordpress theme which I would use for my keyword domain niche sites.  I also created a version that is suited to atomic or micro niche sites.

This has all worked out rather well for me and I can now have a site up and running in less than a day with a few posts of content and all the relevant admin pages (contact, privacy, discliamer, etc).  I am now in the process of migrating my existing older sites into Wordpress sites.  So far this has gone well as previously where I had 10 or so product reviews on an HTML page I have now put each product review into a separate Wordpress post.  As Google sees each of these post as a seperate page my sites have all grown a lot bigger in page count even though the same content is being used.

The move has been positive for each site I have moved over so far and they have either held their top position in Google or moved up in the SERPS.

From now on I am a Wordpress only affiliate marketer.  Although I’ve yet to look at Drupal or Joomla.  Am I missing out on anything?

2009 has been a pretty good year for me.  I gave up my boring IT job, moved to Thailand and tried my hand at Internet Marketing full-time.  Going full-time didn’t boost my earnings as much as I thought they would so I got a couple of part-time jobs to tide me over.  The year finished on a high note with me earning £883 in the last month setting a new personal record.

I’ve learnt a lot in my first year in affiliate marketing and will be putting that into practice in 2010.  Some of the things I will be focusing on in the new year will be:

• Stop buying domains for small-time keyword niche sites. I have enough of these sites in various states of completion to last me a long time and the list is getting too many to mention.  It always seems easier to stop working on long term projects to start a new project that most of the times doesn’t come to much.
• Get my big sites up and running. I have three big sites I plan to get going this month and work on throughout the year.  It was going to be two but I am having quite good success with one niche using PPC that I an going to build a big site around it and promote it via PPC.  The other two will be content sites that I will aim to get traffic organically for.  I need to stop procrastinating around getting started and Just Do It.
• Make more use of PPC. I stayed away from PPC for a long time as I was scared of losing money but most times I have tried it it has paid off.  The amount of traffic I can get from it massively out numbers any traffic my sites get from organic search results alone.   I am going to delve deeper into the world of PPC and AdWords and see how much more traffic I can bring in.  SEO will not be neglected as I think it is essential for long-term success but PPC is just as valuable.
• Reinvest profits. I haven’t done much of this so far but I am going to look into ways of reinvesting my profits in my sites.  Content writing is an obvious solution and perhaps link building is also something I should look into outsourcing.  Anything else I can spend my money on?

My goals and resolutions for 2010 are as follows:

• Do something every day that can bring in money.  I read this somewhere else and liked the idea.  It can be a small thing or a big thing but basically each day you are adding something to your ‘portfolio’ that could lead to a sale whether it be launch a new site, add a new product, start a new campaign or just add a new link to a merchant.
• Be earning £2000 profit per month by end of 2010. I want to be earning £2000 per month by the end of 2010.  This is more than I earned in my day job and will put me in a nice position for when I return to England plus I will also be able to live very comfortably out here on that much too.

Non-Affiliate Marketing:

• Learn Thai
• Take up a sport and stick with it throughout the year – possibly Tennis, Golf or Muay Thai
• Start a diary blog for my travels
• Learn to draw
• Get back in touch with 3 friends from my childhood/school days

Well 2009 is over and it has been an interesting year to say the least.  First I got into affiliate marketing and then I moved to Thailand.  But first things first:  How was my December?

I left it quite late starting my Christmas sites but in the end I pulled my finger out and got a few up and running.  They were started too late to rank well organically so I decided to promote them via AdWords paying for each visit I received.

This started off well and on some days I was making £50 a day profit and I even made about £80 one day.  The month didnt carry on like this and as the items I was promoting ran out of stock my sales dried up.   I was also on holiday for the last two weeks of the month so couldn’t really set-up any new sites or AdWords campaigns.   I decided to leave my existing PPC campaigns running while I was away and kept my fingers crossed they wouldnt cost me too much.

When I got back to Bangkok yesterday I was pleasantly supprise to see I had earned £883 in December.  I spent about £223 on AdWords.  This is about double of what I’ve made in my last few months and has made me very happy.  If I could make this every month I’d be over the moon, especially out here in Thailand where the cost of living is quite low compared to England.

I know a lot of this has come from the Christmas market but I am determined to keep the momentum going and try and get in the same region this month.  PPC really helped alot as it allows your new ventures to get traffic straight away and get the sales trickling in.

How was your December?

Just a quick heads up about this Firefox extension I have recently installed.  It might be old news but I thought I would recommend as it is saving me a lot of time when it comes to building deep links.

Once it is installed there is an Awin button on your browser and once you are on a site you want to deep link to just press the button and you get the url.  No more faffing about in the Awin interface!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9472

Any other affiliate marketing related plugins and extenstions I might hve missed?