I am about to head off on a three week holiday to Australia and have decided I am going to do a mini travel blog of my trip.

The main reason will be to capture my memories and experiences of the trip so I have something to look back on. I will be doing mini reports of the places I go and the things I see along with photos I take on my holiday.

As an affiliate marketeer the second reason will be to make some money! The chances of the blog generating more than a few pounds are slim but I will give it a go and treat it like an experiment into travel writing and how to monetising a blog and generate traffic

The main challenges will be updating it everyday and getting traffic to the blog.

I am going to setup a twitter account for my trip and try and promote the blog through that. Any other suggestions for how I can get traffic to the blog in a short space of time?

I will try and register a domain today and get WordPress setup as I am leaving on Friday so haven’t got much time left.

If you have tips or suggestions on monetising the blog or what audience to target the blog to then please leave a comment below.

Mini Travel Blog is a post from: How I Got Rich

I was setting up a new affiliate marketing site the other day and thought the steps I took might be of use to someone new to the game. Bear in mind I am no expert and these are pretty basic steps but they should get you over the first hurdle if you are just starting out and have picked your niche and domain name. This site uses WordPress.

• Register your domain name. Try and get the .co.uk version but if not go for the .org.uk I use 123reg.co.uk to register my domains.
• Get some webhosting. I have the Hostgator shared hosting account which allows multiple domains (sites). Some people prefer to use a UK hosting company for their UK sites but this costs more.
• Now you need to link your domain from 123reg to your Hostgator hosting. To do this login to your 123reg control panel and go to the domain your just registered. Change the nameservers in 123reg.co.uk to the nameservers listed in your Hostgator support email.
• Now go to your Hostgator control and find the Add on Domains button. Now enter the name of the new domain.
• Now instal WordPress on the domain.  This is easy using Fantastico on the Hostgator Control Panel.
• Pick a theme for the WordPress site.  I use a custom built theme I made for most of my sites but there are many free ones on the web. If you are unsure of what theme to use leave it with the default one for now and come back to this step later.
• Now instal the WordPress plugins for the WordPress site.  After they are installed set them up in WordPress. Some I use include All in One SEO, Statpress, Official Statcounter, Max Press Blog Ping Optimiser, Easy Privacy Page and a few others.
• Now WordPress is setup its time to start adding content.  For nearly all my sites I write (or get someone to write) 300 – 500 words on the niche.  This usually a pretty general peice explaining what the niche is, maybe with some tips for someone looking to buy an item in this niche, mentioning brand names can be good as people often search for them in Google. I put this content in a new post in WordPress and make it a sticky so it is always the first post the visitors and Google sees when they arrive at the site.
• Next I add some products to the site.  The first products I add are usually displayed using Easy Content Units.  I make a unit that displays a range of products from the niche and just shows the image, the title, the merchant name and logo and the price.  I add this ECU to the post I made in the previous step so it is at the top of the site and the first thing a user sees when they arrive at the homepage. 
• Now I start adding individual items from the niche to the site.  I usually start off with the best selling items from the niche and then I tend to write about 200 words about the product with a persuasive tone.  These mini reviews are added to WordPress as new posts.  Each post has the 200 or so words of content, an image of the product, a graphic button for the user to click on to go to the merchant and sometimes an Easy Content Unit comparing the prices of the item at different merchants.
• Once I’ve added a few posts for some products I setup the contact page, the privacy policy and the about page.  These are setup as WordPress pages rather than posts and in each page I use the keywords for the niche and link back to the home page.  For each link I use the keywords I am targeting as anchor text and title text.
• Next you need to get some back links but that is whole other post!
• Now just keep adding new content in the form of product reviews on WordPress posts and getting back links and you should slowly rise up the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

If you found this guide useful or got lost along the way or think it is wrong please leave a comment!

How to Setup an Affilaite Marketing Website is a post from: How I Got Rich

I made my first sale today through the site I have been writing about in this case study.  From the click ref in Affiliate Window it appears the user who made the sale arrived at the site via the PPC advert.  They bought the item via the ECU and picked the lowest priced merchant which was Dixons.

So far so good but what I failed to check was how much commission Dixons were paying on this type of item.  I wrongly assumed their maximum amount of 2.5% was paid on all items but after seeing this sale listed in Affiliate Window I saw I would only get 39p for selling a £39 item.  This works out at 1% and not the 2.5% I was expecting.  I had a quick check of the Dixons commission scale and found that only 1% commission is paid on slow cookers.

Due to this I have now stopped the AdWords campaign for this site and will leave the site alone, therefore ending the case study.

In total I have spent £6.88 on the domain and £1 in clicks from the Adwords campaign and have earned a grand total of 39p commission.  Making a grand loss of £7.49. Without the traffic from Adwords I doubt the site will get any more traffic or make any more sales so I will just chalk this up to experience and move on to the next project.

Lessons learnt: always check the exact comission paid by the merchant for the type of item you are promoting.  Pretty obvious really but something that caught me out this time!

Case Study | First Sale | End of Project is a post from: How I Got Rich

I have tried a couple of AdWords campaigns in the past and have a few running at the moment but they rarely get clicked and have never led to a sale.  I am obviously doing something wrong but I am determined to have a successful campaign as I think AdWords or PPC will be a great way to make money quickly.

I have setup an AdWords campaign for my case study site.  I am bidding 10p per click and am the number one ad ahead of three others.  I will see if I can reduce my bid tomorrow and still retain the top spot. I am bidding on just one keyword ‘RK701115′. Is this normal or do people bid on multiple keywords for the same site?  My ad looks like this:

RK701115 Slow Cooker
RK701115 Tefal Slow Cooker
Lowest Price RK701115 4 in 1 Cooker
www.RK701115.co.uk

Any PPC gurus got any tips for improving my click through rate or how I can get some good quality traffic to my sites using AdWords and finally start making money from this approach?

Case Study | AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) is a post from: How I Got Rich

My first attempt to get the site indexed was to post a link to it from this blog.  New posts on this blog get indexed within a few hours so I thought this would be a good place to post a link but as it was pointed out to me this site cloaks its links so that approach would not work.

Next I decided to put a link to the site in the signature of my profile on A4U but after a few days it has still not been indexed so I have gone down the tried and tested route of submitting the site to Digg.com

Should be indexed any day now…

Case Study | Getting Indexed is a post from: How I Got Rich

I’ve almost finished a new atomic niche site.

The logo links at the bottom of the page are yet to be set but apart from that it is ready to go.

I wonder how quickly the site will get indexed if I only post a link to it from this blog?

The site is about the a Tefal slow cooker and uses an Easy Content Unit for its price comparison feature. The rest of the site I build by hand using HTML, CSS and a touch of PHP. The item retails for about £40 from the cheapest merchant so will land me about £2 per sale (if bought from the lowest priced merchant).  This isn’t much but as my last atomic / micro site was for an item that cost £1,000 I am hoping this one might get more action as I think its easier to ‘sell’ lower priced items as the user is more likely to make a purchase on the spot.

Picking the Niche:

The main thing stopping me making more atomic / micro niche sites is that it is hard to find out whether an item will be something people will be searching for or not.  With a generic niche you can use the Google Keyword Tool to see how many people search for the niche per month.  As atomic niches get much less traffic as they are more targeted the GKT will often say ‘not enough data’ in the search results.  This makes it hard to know if the product you have chosen will get any searches and without any searches you will not get any traffic and without any traffic you will not make any money.  So how did I pick this niche? I thought of a niche – slow cookers – then went to Amazon and picked one with good reviews, that wasn’t too old and that over 75% of the people who had viewed it in Amazon had bought.  I also checked that lots of places sold it so I can do a proper price comparison that would hopefully entice the user to buy then and there as they were sure they were getting a good deal.  I also looked at the natural SERPS for the item to check out the competition.  The Amazon product page for the RK701115 was number one so to me that was a good indicator that I could get to number one as I have beaten Amazon product pages in the past.  That was all I had to go on but I had ticked all my boxes so off I went and registered the domain name and the next day the site was ready.

Promoting the Site:

I am aiming to get the site ranked well organically but if that does not work out I will try promoting it using PPC. If I am paying 10p per click I will need to be making a sale every 20 clicks to break even. If I can make  one sale every 10 clicks that should get me £1 profit per sale.  I would be happy with that provided I make a few sales per day (3.3 sales a day would get me £100 a month which would be great) .  But then how many people are going to be searching for a slow cooker each day?

I’ll be adding comments to this post to track my progress and see if this site sinks or swims.

New Atomic Niche Site Launched is a post from: How I Got Rich