How I Got Rich

£2 Project

I think I’ve written about this before but it only takes a few sites making a few pounds a day to start to add up. For the next few months I am going to focus on getting a number of my existing sites earning a few quid a day which when added up should bring me to my target total of earning £2000 per month from affiliate marketing.

I’ve identified 28 of my sites which I think have the potential to make regular sales. With a target of £2000 a month I will need these 28 sites to each make £2.4 per day.

About 10 of the sites I’ve picked are making over that a day, some by a bit and some by not much.

Some of the 28 sites are seasonal too which poses a bit of a problem too.

How Many Sales Per Day?
If the average commission is about 4% then to make £2.40 per day I will need to be making sales of £60 per day. This is quite a lot and means some of my sites will have to make 2-4 sales per day.

The Approach
I’m going to work through my sites in chronological order with the focus on getting them all to number one or at least on page one of Google for their main keyword. Then once there I can see if they get enough traffic to make £2.4 a day in commission.

First I will add content to the sites then start trying to get backlinks for them in a bid to get them to rise up the SERPs.

How many of your sites make more than £2.40 a day?

Back to Work

Well I’ve just had a week off work and am now back in the grind doing the 9-5. I had a great week off, probably didn’t do as much affiliate marketing as I should but it was nice to be a man of leisure and my own boss for a while. I did suffer from my old problem of not doing as much as I should and doing other things that are fun but won’t earn me money like going to the gym, lying by the pool, learning Thai and doing Thai boxing. These were my goals for the week:

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the last 7 days:
1. Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
2. Get all my sites up to date
3. Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
4. Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

So how did I get on? Not as well as I hoped but what’s the point in having goals if they are too easy to achieve?!

Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)

I was going to look at Aweber for my affiliate marketing mailing list but someone suggested mailchimp.com as it is free for the first 1,000 users so it would be an inexpensive way to test out a mailing list. I signed up with them and added a signup form to my busiest site which gets a good few hundred hits a day. My signup form is in the sidebar of the (WordPress) site and not in a popup but it is above the fold so everyone who lands on the site should see it. After having it on the site for about half a week and being seen by maybe 1000 users no one has signed up! The form does look a bit cruddy as I am yet to smarten it up but I am bit disappointed no one has signed up. I will try and jazz it up a bit and see if that helps and then maybe try putting it in a popup, although I don’t want to scare off any customers.

Get all my sites up to date

I didn’t even get close to this. I spent most of the time working on just one of my sites and adding content to it and smartening it up. The site is on page 4 for its main keyword but gets a fair amount of long tail traffic and makes a few sales so my goal is to get it up to page 1 in Google and see if it becomes more profitable. I’ve added some content but no backlinks so not sure if this will help.

Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites

I read a few blog posts on this but still no closer to outsourcing getting my pages formatted with links, ECU and content. Once I do this I think I will move a few steps up the ladder in terms of earnings as I can get lots of content added to my sites very quickly which is one of my main sticking points at the moment – not having enough time.

Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

No progress on this. Think I will scrap it as too much work to do and probably not much demand for it! Maybe after 5 years.

A Week off Work

Starting tomorrow I have a week off from my day job. This will give me a good opportunity to get cracking on my affiliate marketing stuff for 2011. I’ve got lots of written content to get around to adding to my sites that I’ve been putting off for ages. Plus I want to try a few link building approaches I’ve read about. Apart from that I plan to do a fair amount of wakeboarding, muay Thai and golf practice as well as a few gym session. Should be a busy week!

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the next 7 days:

• Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
• Get all my sites up to date
• Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
• Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

Mini Travel Blog

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.

How to Pick a Big Niche for my Big Site

In prepartion for me giving up the day job and becoming a full-time affiliate marketeer in about seven months I am planning to work on a ‘big site’ from now to then with the goal of it bringing in ₤1000 a month by around July 2011.

Along with the income from my other sites this should cushion the blow of leaving my job and cover the bills until my full time earnings kick in.

The main thing stopping me from starting this big site is deciding on what area or niche to set the site in.

I’ve got three ideas I think are worth a punt but I am very wary of picking the wrong one. I am aware of ‘paralysis by analysis’ which is all too common in new affiliates starting out but seeing as I’ve never really made a successful site so far I don’t want to get it wrong.

My criteria for this project is the following:

• Products must not be seasonal – or at least not completely die out for parts of the year
• Products must cost over ₤50: so that they bring in at least ₤2.50 per sale of which I will need 400 per month at this price which is 14 a day to reach my target.  Increase the product price to ₤100 and I will need just seven sales a day.  This is very rough as commission rates vary between merchants.
• Lots of the merchants operating in this area must have affiliate programmes.  Don’t want to be competing with brands or merchants that I can’t promote on my site.
• Cannot promote with PPC.  Due to my run in with Google Adwords I can no longer get traffic via Adwords so it must be a product type/area/niche I can promote via SEO and get traffic via the organic search results.

Ideas on a postcard please!

Countdown to Going Full-Time (Again)

Things are getting real: countdown to giving up the day job!

Due to a change in personal circumstances I will be becoming a full-time affiliate again in about eight months (July 2011).

I gave this a crack before about a year ago but didn’t use my time wisely enough to increase my profits so didn’t earn enough to keep at it and therefore had to go back to work.

I was gutted to return to work and give up the dream life of working for myself with no boss or alarm clock but hopefully I learnt something from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and next time things will be different.

But for now at least my main focus is to increase earnings over the next eight or so months.

Ideally I want to be bringing home ₤2000 a month by July 2011 but that would mean an increase of about 66% and that sounds like an awful lot!

In theory it only needs 10 of my numerous sites to bring in ₤200 each a month but hardly any of my sites make over ₤50 a month so this too seems like a long shot.

Perhaps eight months is enough time to build a site that will bring in ₤1500 (with the other ₤500 coming from my existing sites) but so far I’ve not even come slightly close to that.

By the end of this month (November) I will have picked a strategy for how to proceed over the next eight months to realise my goal and be a successful (this time) full-time affiliate marketeer.

Setting up a Facebook page for your site

A while ago I had a look at Facebook to see if there were any ways I could get some free traffic sources. I never really followed it up as it seemed like a lot of work for potentially not much in return.

Yesterday I installed the Like plugin on some of my WordPress sites and once I started looking at the settings I saw that you could link it to an account and setup a page for your site.

I decided to create a page for one of my sites on my fake Facebook account and see if I could get any interest in it.

It seems time consuming so I will give it a little try and see what happens without wasting too much time on Facebook.

Has anyone set up a Facebook page for an affiliate marketing website? Did it bring you much traffic or link juice?

Monthly Round-up: September 2010

Bit late this report but here it is anyways. September wasn’t as good as August and I was down about 5-10% from the previous month. I spent about 500 quid on AdWords which is not a direction I really want to be going on but I think those days are over now anyways!

The small drop was a bit of a disappointment but should not be too disheartening as a lot of my sites are primed for the summer months so the dip is natural although it does show I need to focus on some more Autumnal and Winter niches to keep the revenue even throughout the year.

I’ve been buying a lot of backlinks the last month or two which have come in the form of forum profile links via ODesk and paid for blog commenting. Both have seen my sites rise slightly in the SERPS so I will be carrying on with this for the foreseeable future.

I’m still outsourcing content writing too which is going well.

I started a new site which had a more generic domain name instead of the exact match Smingle style keyword domains I normally use. The domain is widgetshop.co.uk Obviously I would have loved to have widget.co.uk but it was gone so hopefully the addition of shop won’t be too much of a problem. The reason I have decided to try this type of domain is that now I am acquiring backlinks, something I’ve never done in the past, I feel I can go for more competitive or general niches as I can use the backlinks to boost my site in the SERPs. I will be reporting on whether this works or not.

My Christmas site is still getting more content but now that I can no longer rely on traffic from AdWords PPC I am not confident it will bring in any cash which is a shame as last December was really very good for me.

I read on this affiliate marketing blog about someone launching a new site that is more general and it has inspired me to try and do something with one of my more general domain names. Unfortunately my domain is in the same niche or area as their one so I hope they don’t mind a bit of friendly competition (if I ever get around to doing anything)!

I’ve also discovered a few blogs on people who travel around the world living off their online earnings. They seem to do it with a mix of affiliate marketing and other types of sites that earn them money. This has been pretty interesting reading considering my situation so is something I will be looking into more in the future.

Goals for the next few months are:
Earn more money! Obvious but the amount I am earning now is used for living expenses and things like that. If I could get a few more hundred pounds a month I could do some serious investment in my sites with links and content which I think will help move my up a level or two.

Get a big site up and running. I have couple of domains which I think would be good but its just a matter of picking one and spending a few hundred pounds on content and links and seeing what happens. Bit reluctant as its a bit of a risk as to whether I can get a site ranked in a competitive niche or not. If it works though I could see a nice increase in revenue.

That’s it really. Bit of a long one but hope you found it interesting!

Appalling Click Through Rates

Today I’ve been looking through my stats for the previous month to try and indentify which sites are making money and which are losing me money.

It was quite depressing reading.

Lots of my sites are ranked quite well for their keywords but either get very little traffic or if they do get the hits hardly make any sales.

You put in the work to setup a site, get it ranking ok, keep the products up to date and add content but still the visitors do not come or when they do they don’t buy anything.

I think my sites do add something to the user experience: they gather together all the products of one type from lots of different merchants and lay them out clearly in one place, sorted by price, so the user can see them all in one place and what is in their price range.

This is a rather negative post from me and I know I am one of the lucky ones who has managed to make a few quid from this game so shouldn’t complain but the more you try to analyse things to see how you can improve what you have the more I seem to realise how random things seem to be in what makes a good niche or site and what doesn’t.

But I will keep going. For now my main focus is getting my Christmas site up to scratch and also trying to get all my existing small niche sites ranking well for their main keyword.

Then I will start thinking about the bigger picture and how I can move things forward in 2011.

Christmas is Just Around the Corner

I know its more than three months away but now is the time to start your Christmas sites if you have not done so already.

Last December I had my best month at the time earning about 850 quid which was about double what I earnt the previous month.

I only started the site in November (I think) so imagine how much you could earn if you started now.

What do people buy (more of) int he run up to Christmas?

• New TVs
• Extra chairs and tables for when family come over
• New plates and cutlery
• Toys/presents
• Recipe books
• Hampers
• Booze

I’m sure there are loads more ideas out there but that should get you started.

Good luck and merry Christmas!