How I Got Rich

Back from my Holidays

I’m almost back from my holidays.  Just spending a few days making use of a broadband connection and my laptop before returning to Thailand.  I did no work in July and still made the same amount of money I made in June which was really nice so had my two best months earnings-wise back to back.

Now that I’ve had a few days with my laptop and a decent Internet connection I’ve been checking my all my sites to see if they are still working and ranking ok.  One of my first fairly successful sites has just been overtaken in the SERPS and has been pushed to number two which was sad to see but I hadn’t updated it in over six months so can’t really complain.  I’ve since moved it over to WordPress and written more content for it in the hope of getting it back to number one but am not loosing too much sleep over it as its a seasonal domain and its season is about to end.

I registered two domains yesterday.  They are both clothing sites.  Clothing sites seem to be a bit hit and miss but I will stick something basic up for each of them and see what happens.

My big site is still floundering.  It gets some long tail traffic but nothing for the keywords I am targeting.

Which brings me on nicely to my main problem: backlinks!

I have no clue how to get them so am going to focus this month on finding out how to outsource them.  Once I have found out how to pay for them I will be apply them to all my sites.

My goal at the moment is to be earning £2000 per month by Christmas (so I can give up the day job) and then £3000 per month by June 2010.

Wish me luck!

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?

Google AdWords vs Google Keyword Tool part III

This is the conclusion to my short test to compare the Google Keyword Tool records against Adwords advert impressions to see if they match up.

I believe the results of the Google Keyword Tool to be wildly overoptimistic but I wanted to findout by how much.  I setup an Ad for a keyword one of my sites is ranked number two for in Google.

For March 2010 the GKWT says there were 12,100 exact searches  for my keyword.

My ad, when it was on page one in Google got around 200 impressions per day.

The ad only ran for two weeks but the impressions stayed around the 200 per day mark during this time.

200 per day x 31 days = 6,200 searches.

So it looks like the GKWT is reporting 100% more searches than the number of impressions the advert received.

Also during my site was only get about 3-6 unique hits per day (nearly all from organic SERPS) which is a click through rate of about 3% for being number two in Google which sucks big time!

It would be interesting to see if other people got the same results but at the end of the day its probably not worth the effort.

Google AdWords vs Google Keyword Tool

My regular readers will know I often like to grumble about the lack of accuracy of the Google Keywoord Tool.

Getting a site to number one in Google usually gives me about 2-4% of the number given by the Google Keyword Tool for exact search in hits per month i.e. Google Keyword Tool says 14,000 exact matches for my sites main keyword but my site will only get about 500 hits per month making it completely unprofitable.  Either no one is clicking through or the Google Keyword Tool is well out.

So to find out I have just setup an AdWords campaign for one of my sites main keyword.  The Keyword Tool said there were 12,100 exact searches for this keyword last month but my site at number two in Google only got 140 hits in that month (1%).

Lets see how many impressions my ad gets (and lets hope it doesn’t cost me too much!).

What I done did today

After work and between the gym and my Thai class I wrote a few more bits of content about an older site which is finally climbing the Google tree and is at number three.  These were two 250ish word product reviews that I have done as separate Wordpress posts.

I’ve also decided to split apart my big site I am working on into two smaller big sites as the two areas are not that closely related.  After deciding this I spend some time looking for a UK based host I could host the site with as I want to move away from having all my sites on one server based in a different country to the one I am targeting.

After I’ve picked the host I will look for a WordPress theme that meets my needs and get cracking on the site.  I want it ranking well for at least one product before Easter so I’ve not got long to get something up.  Hopefully I will have a quiet weekend and get some work done.

One of my newish sites made its first sale netting £10 commission which was nice.  A few more of those this month will make me happy.

Busy Beaver

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.

Can’t Even be Bothered to Check Sales AKA post-Christmas Blues

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?

Weekend Break

I went away for the weekend as it was the King’s birthday and therefore a long weekend.  We heading off to Koh Chang which is one of the Thai islands.  Koh Chang means Elephant Island and we saw quite a few elephants wandering around and also went for a ride on them which involved swiming with them at the end.

I decided to leave my PPC campaigns running over the weekend as I had been doing quite well leading up to the weekend and on the Sunday I found an Internet cafe and had a quick check of my stats.  Unfortunately most of the items I was promoting with PPC has sold out so although I was getting the traffic and clicks through to the merchants hardly any sales were made.

I am now trying to find some more items to promote that are popular but still in stock as I reckon there is about another week left of people buying Christmas presents online.

I’m away next week until the new year so will be trying to make the most of the Christmas shopping before I go.

Anyone know how to find which Christmas items are proving popular so far this year?

Knock me down with a feather – another £50 day

Another good day in the run up to Christmas.  Yesterday I tweaked my Adwords ads and updated some of my ECUs that were pointing to out of stock merchants and today I have a lower PPC spend and have made more commission.

Break down goes a little something like this:

• Awin: £42
• Amazon: £26
• Adwords: £14
• Profit: £54

Obviously these are all pending but I’ve not had many rejections so far (touch wood) and PPC spend isn’t in sync with sales as there are time zone issues afoot but overall it looks positive.

I’d love to spend today checking my sites and setting up some new campaigns but as regular reader may know I recently started a new part-time day job.  Although the job is only one day a week it also takes a full day to prepare so unfortunately today and tomorrow will be affiliate marketing free apart from the odd bit of stolen time.  I am quite gutted as I only get £35 for the day of work (which actually takes two days) and I could earn more than that from Internet marketing but its not all about the money right?

Down But Not Out

Not another £50 day yesterday but a £25 day which is still great.

• £22 was made through Awin
• £25 was made through Amazon
• £21.69 was spent through Adwords

A lot of the sales did not come via the PPC campaigns so I probably made a loss/broke even/made a slight profit on the Christmas PPC sites.  I put this down to a few of my best seller going out of stock and a fair amount of sales going through Play.com who only give about 0.5% commission.

This is all slightly out due to the fact my Adwords account is in a -8 time zone so it doesn’t match up with my Affiliate Window account which is 8 hours ahead of the Adwords account.  Has anyone managed to get Google to change the time zone of their Adwords account?

I am tempted to try and open a new account and put it in the right time zone this time as it is annoying me not being able to compare spend on ads with income from sales day by day.

That reminds me, I better put some money on my credit card as I will be getting a pretty big Adwords bill sometime soon!