How I Got Rich

Monthly Round-up for August 2010

Don’t think I have done one of these for a while but as I am now back from my holidays I thought I better do a quick one for August.

I was away for the first three weeks of August (as well as July) so didn’t do that much work on my sites but the main thing I have been doing is the outsourcing of the acquisition of forum profile back links (you can read how I did this on this blog). I ordered them in batches of 120 and did it for four of my sites but its been over a week now and the links are not showing up in any backlink checks I’ve done so cannot say if they have made a difference or not. I doubt these links are very high quality but they’ve got to be better than nothing.

I’m still outsourcing written content which is really helping my sites as I’m too busy/lazy to write my own content these days and this way allows me to get good, fresh content for my sites. Have a look on ODesk and see if you can find a good writer if you are interested in doing this.

I still haven’t gotten around to trying out the financial leads through the Affiliate Marketing School as I am still scared of losing lots of money on PPC but I will bite the bullet one day – maybe once some money starts coming through from AWin.

My ‘big site’ is still not ranking at all which sucks. I’ve done about 50 200 word product pages for the desired keyword and its still not on the first 60 pages of Google and judging by some of the other pages in the top 600 the competition isn’t that stiff. This is my first site which does not have the keyword in the domain and I’m now realising just how much a keyword domain helps.

I’ve also started three new keyword niche sites this month after a long time of not starting any new sites. None of them are particularly good niches as they get pretty low hits but they might bring in a few quid each month which is nothing to complain about but not really the road I want to keep going down long term (lots of little sites).

What I am thinking about at the moment is moving from getting a large slice of a small pie to getting a small slice of a big pie. At the moment my sites do quite well in the SERPS (apart from my big site) but the niches are pretty low traffic so even if I get to number 1 in Google and take a large slice of the niche pie I still don’t get much money. But now I am thinking to maybe go after a more competitive niche but aim to get in the bottom half of page 1 and just have a smaller slice of the much bigger niche pie. To do this I will still need a keyword domain but as they are all gone in the competitive niches I might start appending them with buy_____.co.uk or _______store.co.uk as I’ve seen other people doing this. I don’t really like the idea of muscling into niches in which other affiliates are already operating but people are doing this to me now so maybe its time I started doing it too. What do you think readers?

This month my profits were up about 10% on last month which I am pleased about and I will be aiming to do the same next month.

In September I will be mostly working on my Christmas site – it’s only 3 months away!

Big Site #1: Comedy Box Sets

I’ve setup and started the first of my two big sites.  It is called Comedy Box Sets and can be found at this address: http://comedyboxsets.co.uk/

I watch a lot of comedy TV serieses and after seeing a profitable affiliate site about a TV series I thought why not try and combine a hobby (is watching TV a hobby?) with an affiliate marketing venture.

I am not too worried about the design at the moment and am going to be focussing on adding content for the time being.

The plan is that as I watch a comedy show I will write a little bit about the series of the episode on the blog and put some links to merchants that sell that DVD.  If there is any merchandise available for the show I will link to that also.  Then there is tickets for standup comedy shows and films that the actors are in.

I know alot of people are downloading TV shows now but I hope there are still some people out there buying DVDs.

I am going to try and promote the site using as many means as possible and have setup a twitter account for it and will probably do a facebook group.  Does anyone know how to get lots of twitter followers quickly? I think I will do a mailing list at some point too.

It is not going to be the most profitable of sites but I hope it will be fun to write and something that will hold my interst over the months and years.

My other big site will hopefully be more profitable as it will be selling a wider range of items at a wider range of prices but I am yet to start that one.

Christmas Sites Ahoy!

I know I left it very late but I have finally got two Christmas sites up.  They are both about a single toy I think will be popular this Christmas.  One costs about £50 and the other about £20.  I think I’ve left it too late for them to be indexed and ranked well so I have started a PPC campaign for each one.  Hopefully they will get some action before the big day.

The campaign I started yesterday has already had a few clicks which have lead to clicks through to the merchant but no sales as of yet.  I am quite confident I will make some sales as my sites have the lowest prices on them thanks to an ECU unit.

I’ve got two or three more Christmas domains so will be working on getting those sites up and running by the end of the weekend.

How are your Christmas sites doing?

Another New Site

I recently purchases two domains for niches I already have sites in.  The domains I had already are abbreviations of the ones I just purchased with the new ones getting more searches and are the domains I should have registered in the first place.

I was toying with the idea of redirecting the original domains to the newer ones but have now opted to build a separate site for each domain.  Today I almost finished one of the sites with just the privacy policy, disclaimer pages etc to finish.  The site is for a summery niche so hopefully I will get a couple of sales out of it before the winter months kick in (if they haven’t already).  I will then keep it updated and hopefully it will be well ranked for next year.  The other is probably also a seasonal one as it for sporting equipment for something I doubt is that popular in the winter months.  Again if I can keep working on it and get it ranked for next year that will be good.

I have a bunch of other domains registered which I will be aiming to get a few sites setup for this week although I am starting my first of two half days a week volunteering at a children’s school type place this week.  I’ve also started looking for a job as my earnings have dipped too much and will not be enough for me to eek out a subsistence on as its much more expensive out here than I thought it would be!

Still haven’t started any sites for Christmas!

Working Offline

As the maid was coming I went to the Starbucks over the road with my Netbook to do a few hours of affiliate marketing work.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get on the Internet over there so had to work offline.  This gave me a good opportunity to develop a new WordPress theme for my single product, micro nice sites.  Previously I had been making these sites by hand using HTML & CSS but I thought using WordPress will make it easier to add more content as I can just do a new post rather than a new page and also I can benefit from the supposedly favourable way Google ranks WordPress sites and blogs.

I modified an existing WordPress theme I had developed and changed it to one column with three side bars that sit below the last post.  I built the theme then started adding content.  This was a bit of a mistake as to copy a WordPress installation and its content from a local machine to the online installation looks quite hard and something I decided not to attempt which meant I had to copy it manually.

I finished the site yesterday which took two days including the design of the theme.  This was longer than I hoped to spend on one of these single product sites as they are very hit and miss as you are definitely putting all your eggs in one product.  I also had problems with the ECU price comparison widget as some of the merchants were not showing in the search results which could potentially lose me sales if the visitor goes off to check if that merchant has the product in stock.

I’ve  setup an AdWords PPC campaign for it which should get me some traffic and some sales – fingers crossed.  I will let it run to £13.75 of clicks (which is the amount of commission I will get from a sale) and if it has not made a sale pull it.

Another Busy Day at the (Home) Office

As the new work hard regime continues I have had another busy day today.  I got one site up and running with a WordPress installation and 10 new product posts.  I have also been researching products and have found six products I am going to setup atomic/micro niche sites for.  These are items I think might be popular at Christmas time so will try and get them up and running this week.

I’m not sure if I will promote them via PPC or leave them for a while and see how they rank organically in the SERPs.

Business has been slow this month and I am only on £221 so far for the month with less than 10 days of September to go.  When I started out about six months ago September was going to be my make or break month with a goal of £500.  I don’t think I will hit that this month but will carry on regardless for another few months at least.  I still have £99 of commission pending with Affiliate Window so if that got confirmed by the end of the month it might not be so bad.

Day One of the New Regime

After yesterday’s decision to turn over a new leaf regarding my affiliate marketing efforts I had quite a productive day.

I started work at 8.45am after going to the gym and having breakfast and worked through to 11.30am when I stopped for an hour to make and eat lunch.   During that 2hr 45m session I started on my latest site and added 10 product write-ups for it with each being between 100 and 200 words.

After lunch I finished the site off by adding the contact, about, discliamer and privacy policy site and did a link exchage for it and submitted it to digg to get it indexed.  The site is now ready and I will add new product posts to it as the weeks go on.

At about 2.15pm I started work on another micro niche site for a single product.  I used an existing template of mine and had most of the site ready by 3pm when I stopped work for the afternoon and headed out to Bangkok’s Chinatown.

I got in at around 8.30pm and half worked, half browsed the web whilst finishing off the new micro niche site.  The Internet was very slow so didn’t get much done.

I went to bed at about 12.30am feeling quite pleased that I had got one site up and running and almost finished off another one.

If I can keep this up I should be able to get a couple of new sites up and running each week whilst still being able to add content to existing ones.  My goal is to be making £100o a month by Christmas.

Today hasn’t been as productive as the apartments were getting fumigated to I went over to Starbucks to work.  I did about four hours there until the laptop had run out of battery.  I went back home but they had not finished so I sat by the pool reading for a few hours.  This afternoon I have been finishing off the micro nice site and fixing an old site I have just noticed wasn’t rendering properly for some reason.  Tonight I will start a new site and hope to get five products listed on it.

I’m determined to make this work as I can’t face another month of seeing one or two pounds commission coming in most days being the norm.

Two New Micro Niche Sites Done

I spent today making two new atomic niche sites, each one is for just one product.  My previous site in this style has done quite well (£50 in a month) so I thought I’d start doing a few more.  If I can get 10 going that bring in £30 a month I will be very happy.  I have also started a PPC campaign for each of the sites to help drive traffic to them.  I think I will be a bit less cautious with my bidding this time and try to get my CTR up with some high bids at the beginning.

Finding products that didn’t already have a micro niche site already was quite hard as nearly every product I looked up had a site already.  Someone has been very busy!

I’m going to spend a day researching products and then get the domains registered then spend the next day setting the sites up and starting the PPC campaigns for them.  Hopefully this should be a nice little earner for September.

New Atomic Niche Site Launched

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 Site Launched

I’ve finished the design of a new site (#26) and put in a bit of content so its ready to be indexed.

Normally when a site gets indexed it tends to go straight into page one in Google for a few days and then if Google decides it is worthy of page one it will stay but more often than not it gets shunted down the ranks to page 10 and beyond!

Due to this I now always make sure my site had a fair few affiliate links on before it gets indexed.  This means that I have a good chance of converting some of the page one traffic it will gets before Google sends it off to page 10.  Another site I launched last week did this and managed to make a few sales before it left page one.  Hopefully the sites will return and make some decent sales but its nice to get a few quid out of them before they head off to exile.

This new site is for a type of tool and got 33,100 exact searches in June 2009.  If I get to number one in Google I’d expect 5% of that number in hits per month which is equal to 1,650 hits per month.  If 10% of those resulted in a sale I could be looking at ( {average comission = £1.50} x {10% of 1,650 hits per month = 165} ) £247 per month.  Highly unlikely but worth a punt nevertheless.