How I Got Rich

Looking for a UK host that…

• …will let me pay by Paypal
• …doesn’t require a UK postal address
• …will let me do a whois opt-out on .co.uk
• …has fantastico and CPanel
• …doesn’t cost an arm and a leg

I’ve tried signing up with a few but due to my location I never get past the final stage for reasons related to my location.

Feel free to post affiliate links to your recommendations.

Cheers.

Price Tapestry

I heard about Price Tapestry a long time ago but after a quick look I decided it was a bit too advanced for me and I left it alone, especially after Easy Content Units came out and did what looks like something similar much easier.

However, I am sure there is much more to Price Tapestry than I am aware of and as I start my ‘big site’ it is probably something I should investigate to see if I could be of use to me.

So before I do do any of my readers use it or know much about it?

Does anyone know of any sites that use it they wouldn’t mind linking to?

Is it easy to use?

After work today I wrote up two 200 word product reviews for my ‘big site’ and spent far too long tinkering with the placement of product images on it wasting valuable time.  The rest of the evening was spent at language class and then stuff for work tomorrow.   Roll on the weekend when I can spend a good chunk of time on my sites.  It’s a fun life!

That Sunday Night Feeling

Now that I am back working full-time some of the things I’d left behind are returning.

The main one is that Sunday night feeling where you know you have work the next day which is even worse after having some time off.  Last week I was off from work and was on holiday and today (Monday) is a public holiday so I am getting that Sunday night feeling a day late but it is just as strong if not stronger.  I am really fired up to do some affiliate marketing work but have lots of planning and preparation to do for the day job so can’t even do that!

I’ve set myself another goal which is to be earning £900 a month by the end of June which is about four months time.  This should be enough for me to quit the day job and go full-time again.

I plan to do this via my existing sites and the addition of one big site which I am yet to start.

Can it be done? Watch this space.

Getting all my sites to number 1 in Google

This might sound like an obvious goal but for now I am going to focus on getting my existing sites to number one in Google.  Most of them are at number one in Google for their main keyword but not all of them.

Normally I start a new site, put up some content and wait for it to get to number one.  If after a while it is not on page one or close then I leave it and move on.  But as I have vowed to not make any new sites for a while I am thinking I might as well get the sites I have to number one so I can see if any of them will get any traffic.

I have sites for keywords that get, according to the Google keyword tool, anything from 3,000 to 50,000 exact searches a month.  As I’ve now realised the Google keyword tool is not to be believed and does not even give a rough idea of searches.  This has made me think that I might be sitting on a site that gets 100’s of 1000’s of exact searches each month and I won’t know until I get the site to number one.

So with that in mind I am going back to my older sites that don’t rank well and seeing what I can do to get them to number one.

I’ve never really done any work on back links so I might have to finally get around to giving it a serious go.  I will also be adding content which I will probably end up outsourcing as I don’t have much spare time any more.  It is quite expensive at £10 for 500 words but probably cost effective in the long run?

Anyone got any tips for getting a site to number one in Google?

8 Pages in 2 Hours

I read something just now in Kirty’s blog which has inspired me to set myself a new challenge.  Kirsty mentioned that she sets herself the target of writing eight pages a day and aims to do so  in two hours.  Later on she says each page is about 250 words.

After reading that I have decided to set myself the same target.  Each day I will write 8 new pages for my existing sites (of which I have many).  I will aim to do it in two hours but will give myself longer if need be.  Each page will most likely be a Wordpress post with an image of the product a link to the merchant and an ECU where appropriate.  Each post should be about 150-250 words.

Two hours isn’t long and I will spend the rest of my time working on other aspects of my sties including link building, finding new products or anything else I can think of.

Right, I better get off and start writing!

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?

2009 & 2010

2009 has been a pretty good year for me.  I gave up my boring IT job, moved to Thailand and tried my hand at Internet Marketing full-time.  Going full-time didn’t boost my earnings as much as I thought they would so I got a couple of part-time jobs to tide me over.  The year finished on a high note with me earning £883 in the last month setting a new personal record.

I’ve learnt a lot in my first year in affiliate marketing and will be putting that into practice in 2010.  Some of the things I will be focusing on in the new year will be:

• Stop buying domains for small-time keyword niche sites. I have enough of these sites in various states of completion to last me a long time and the list is getting too many to mention.  It always seems easier to stop working on long term projects to start a new project that most of the times doesn’t come to much.
• Get my big sites up and running. I have three big sites I plan to get going this month and work on throughout the year.  It was going to be two but I am having quite good success with one niche using PPC that I an going to build a big site around it and promote it via PPC.  The other two will be content sites that I will aim to get traffic organically for.  I need to stop procrastinating around getting started and Just Do It.
• Make more use of PPC. I stayed away from PPC for a long time as I was scared of losing money but most times I have tried it it has paid off.  The amount of traffic I can get from it massively out numbers any traffic my sites get from organic search results alone.   I am going to delve deeper into the world of PPC and AdWords and see how much more traffic I can bring in.  SEO will not be neglected as I think it is essential for long-term success but PPC is just as valuable.
• Reinvest profits. I haven’t done much of this so far but I am going to look into ways of reinvesting my profits in my sites.  Content writing is an obvious solution and perhaps link building is also something I should look into outsourcing.  Anything else I can spend my money on?

My goals and resolutions for 2010 are as follows:

• Do something every day that can bring in money.  I read this somewhere else and liked the idea.  It can be a small thing or a big thing but basically each day you are adding something to your ‘portfolio’ that could lead to a sale whether it be launch a new site, add a new product, start a new campaign or just add a new link to a merchant.
• Be earning £2000 profit per month by end of 2010. I want to be earning £2000 per month by the end of 2010.  This is more than I earned in my day job and will put me in a nice position for when I return to England plus I will also be able to live very comfortably out here on that much too.

Non-Affiliate Marketing:

• Learn Thai
• Take up a sport and stick with it throughout the year – possibly Tennis, Golf or Muay Thai
• Start a diary blog for my travels
• Learn to draw
• Get back in touch with 3 friends from my childhood/school days

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.

I Want a £50 a Day Site!

There was a thread started recently on the affiliates 4 u forum where someone was asking advice about their site which they claim is currently making £50 a day profit  [ click to view thread ].

No offence to the owner but the site doesn’t look that amazing and doesn’t have tons of content so seems like something most of us could pull off quite easily.  But as with most things that earn good money it is all about the idea rather than the execution. Although the trademark domain is a risky strategy.

Anyways, it got me thinking, £50 a day is about £1500 a month which is an amount I would be very happy to be bringing in and would allow me to live comfortably out here in Thailand.  So why haven’t I got a £50 a day site?  There are many reasons and the main being because I haven’t had an idea good enough.  This can be seen from the 40 or so sites I have at the moment that just about bring in £400 a month combined. Imagine if five of them were £50 a day sites…

Do you know of any sites that bring in this kind of money?

Are they massive sites with lots of products or has someone just come up with the right idea at the right time?

Trademarks in Domains?

I might have left it too late but I’m going to register some domains for Christmas sites.  I’m going to be promoting toys I think will be popular this Christmas and make a mini site for each toy or product.

From what I’ve read the advice says to use the name of the toy in the domain name but from what I’ve read in the past this is not a good a idea as the chance of getting a letter from a lawyer is quite high.

I won’t be using the trademark of the company making the toy but will be using keywords that are used in the name of the toy.  For example for a product from Matel called My First Baby Walker I would register a domain like www.firstbabywalker.com.  Will this get me into trouble?

As these sites are for the Christmas market I won’t have them up for too long.

What are your thoughts in this instance?  I know domains like SonyPlaystation2.com are going to get you into trouble but will a domain like the one in my example still draw the same amount of attention and get me in trouble?

Hopefully I am not too late for Christmas and I can get these sites up and running this week giving me about six weeks until the big day.