How I Got Rich

This is the kind of idea I should be having

I stumbled across this website yesterday – Thailand ebooks – and it occurred to me that this was the kind of site I should’ve thought of or at least something along these lines.

Since being in Thailand I have been thinking about trying to find a way to use my location and experience of being in Thailand from an affiliate perspective.  I thought about a Thailand blog (which I did start) but couldn’t think how to monetise it.  I presumed the readership would already be based in Thailand so what could I sell them?  I couldn’t find any Thai affiliate programmes and ordering items online overseas is a bit risky due to the officials down at customs always on the lookout for tea money.

But the above site finds a clever way around that by promoting online products of which in this niche there are money.

Hats off to your sir whoever you are!

Moving Old Sites Over to Wordpress

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?

Post Christmas Market?

With the Christmas shopping rush about to end now is probably a good time to start thinking about what items to promote in the post-Christmas haze.

I guess fitness and weight loss items will be good but are there any other smaller niches that are at their most active in the new year?  Holidays might be a good one as people used to book their summer break straight after Christmas.

Any one got any hot tips?

Things have been going pretty well so far this money with PPC driving most of my sales.  Main problem has been items keep selling out and the merchants are not getting restocked so have to keep trying to come up with new ideas for items to promote.  Also my part-time job is taking up more and more of my time so had less time to cash in on the Christmas buying frenzy.

Hope your Christmas sites are going well and if I don’t get to post before the big day have a good one!

Check for out of Stock Merchants

It is obvious you should regularly check the merchants you are linking to have the items in stock you are promoting.

However it is something that I overlooked and after going over the stats for yesterday I saw quite a lot of the items I was advertising on my sites were out of stock.  Some of them were still displaying as in stock on my Easy Content Units (ECU) but when I clicked through to the merchant the items were no longer in stock.

Chances are the user will go back to your site and try another merchant but there is also the chance they will just load Google in the current window and find another site with the item by-passing your site.

Another issue I had was that a few merchants had gone out of stock and Play.com became the lowest priced merchant with the item in stock.  This was bad news as Play.com seems to only pay about 1% commission so suddenly my sales were at a similar level but commission was slashed dramatically.

All the above would apply to SEO driven sites but with PPC it becomes much more urgent as you are paying for all your traffic and a bad day could wipe out all profits.

Again I guess this highlights the problem of having lots of small sites that applies to the approach I have taken so far.  The more small sites you have promoting individual items the more site and products you have to check to see if everything is working.

I think once the Christmas traffic has died down I will try and setup up a hand-full of high value PPC campaigns that get me £20 or so commission per sale.  Hopefully this should be easier to manage on a day to day basis.

IKEA Facebook Showdown

Check out this video about how IKEA used Facebook to promote themeselves.

Imagine being able to do that with your affiliate marketing sites!