How I Got Rich

Going On Holiday

Well I am off on my summer holidays next weekend so am frantically trying to tie up as many lose ends as possible regarding my affiliate marketing websites.  I did think about taking the netbook with me but with a 12″ screen it is too big plus where I am going I’m not sure if it would survive the journey.  I did look into getting a cheaper, smaller one but there doesn’t seem to be any £100 or so mini netbooks on the market.

Instead I will try and find some internet cafes and try and do the odd hour here and there although I don’t know how realistic that will be when I have the option of being on the beach or by the pool.

So before I go I will load up the USB stick with all my site info and try to find a FTP programme I can run off the thumb drive so I can easily upload any files.  As I use WordPress now for nearly all my sites updating them shouldn’t be too hard providing I have internet access.

Have a good summer!

Beware the Google Slap

Recently I set up a new site that I was going to promote via PPC using Google’s  AdWords.  I set the site up and created a page for each item and put an image of the product on the page and an Easy Content Unit comparing the prices from different merchants.

Instead of adding content I decided to start some AdWords campaigns for the site to get the ball rolling and hits coming in before I got around to writing and adding the content.

The next time I logged into AdWords to check the campaign I noticed my keywords had a 1/10 quality score and the reason given was something to do with a poor quality site.   The low quality score means my ads will hardly ever, if at all, be shown.

I then added the content, waited for it to get indexed and started a new campaign on the same account for the site.  Google noticed straight away and gave me another 1/10 quality score.

So now I have registered a new domain and am in the process of moving the content over.

Once I have done that I will start a new campaign for the site and hopefully it will pass Google’s criteria.

Fingers crossed…

Buying Backlinks

I have never really been able to find good backlinks.  I’ve done the odd link exchange and blog comment but apart from that I’ve just relied on on-page SEO. 

Most of my sites are in small niches so this method has done me OK so far.  My sites either rank OK with content and on-page SEO or they don’t.

But as I’ve recently started outsourcing content writing I thought I would have a look buying some backlinks.

The first place I am trying is http://www.socialmaximizer.com/

They allow you to chose how many sites you want to get your site bookmarked at according to your budget and then they take it from there.

I have just ordered £13.81 or $20 worth of links which is about 100 of them for one site.

The site is in the bottom half of page one in Google and according to http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ has backlinks from two websites.

I will report back when the backlinks start to show up and see if it does any good or not.

Have you used any backlinking services?  How did you find them?

Monthly Round-Up: May 2010

May 2010 was my best month in affiliate marketing so far apart from December 2009.  I did quite well last month so wasn’t sure if I would be able to top it but was very pleased when I did. Also  one of my sites that started the month off well and was on page one in Google got knocked way down the SERPS for some reason at the start of the month and didn’t make any more more sales.  But a few of my other sites stepped up and I made a good income for May.  Also during this month my Adwords account was suspendde due to non payment until the last few days of May so I only spent about £9 on clicks which was very good.

A fair amount of this traffic was seasonal though so I need to keep working other sites to keep me going all year round.

I’ve also been doing a lot of outsourcing.  I’ve been getting someone to write product descriptions for me which keeps me supplied with fresh content for my sites and is something I would definitely recommend to anyone who has trouble motivating themselves to write content.

I have also outsorced the design of a webstie which I am very pleased with.  I will be using this design for my PPC financial leads project so I wanted something good and I was happy with what I got.  I will be starting work on this in June.

I will be away for six weeks from the start of July so am trying to get as much done before then as probably won’t be able to do much affiliate marketing work whilst on the road.

How was your May 2010?