How I Got Rich

Forgotten About Sites

I was checking my Amazon stats this morning as I do each morning and noticed some sales from a site I had forgotten about.  I hadn’t setup and tracking for the site in StatCounter so never saw it in my list of sites and therefore had forgotten about it.  It looked like one person had bought quite a few things which was nice so I looked up the site to see what state it was in.

Most of the links are still to active products and the site is now number two in Google for a 22,000 exact match keyword according to the Google Key Word Tool which is nice to see.  Further examination of my sales stats shows it has been making the odd sale here and there over the past few weeks and months.

I’m now going to update any dead links on the site and add a bit more content and see if I can get it to number one.  The items on the site sell for well over £50 and are not sold in many shops so on paper it sounds like a pretty good niche.

Fingers crossed…

What I’m Doing at the Moment

Here is a quick update of what I am doing at the moment in the world of affiliate marketing:

• Getting my existing sites to number one in Google. I’m doing this by moving them to WordPress and writing or buying new content for them.  Once they are all well ranked in Google I can see which ones are worth focusing on.
• Trying PPC for Financial Leads. I’m in the process of getting a site designed which I can use for collecting financial leads which I will get traffic via AdWords.  I’m going to be doing this via the Affiliate Marketing School.
• Working on my big site. This is still not ranking but will keep adding content to hopefully get it listed for some good keywords.
• Have a look at some more micro niche sites. My old ones are still bringing in the odd £15 sale once or twice a month so they are not to be dismissed.  Obviously some of them never made a sale.  Maybe I will sit down and do 10 or so on the weekend and see how they get on.

I think that is it for me.  I also want to have a closer look at feeds and automating things a bit more but will wait for a while.

Short term goal is still to be making £1000 by September 2010 and long term goal is to be making £2000 per month by September £2000.

Outsourcing Written Content

When I first started out in affiliate marketing I was quite happy to write 200 word product descriptions of things I’d never used or seen in real life but once I experienced my first downturn in profits I lost most of my enthusiasm for all things slightly boring and since then I’ve found it hard to motivate myself to write much content for my sites and as any SEO’er will tell you Content is King.

Recently I started paying for articles for my sites to be written by someone else.  I was happy to pay them and they did a good job.  I was making money so I thought why not reinvest it in my ‘business’?  Whenever I started a new affiliate marketing site I would commission a 500 word piece of content for that site on the topic of the niche to give the site a kick-start in the SERPS.  Now I am going to have a go at getting the product descriptions outsourced.  Hopefully this should speed things up a lot and allow me to get my sites ranking faster and bringing money in quicker.

Once that is all sorted I will need to have a look at getting backlinks outsourced as so far I have hardly managed to get any for my sites.

Can anyone recommend a backlinks provider?

A Month Off

I spent the first two weeks of April down at the beaches and last weekend I was out of the country so after my day job I have had little time to spend on affiliate marketing.  Although the sales have still been coming in I guess I have lost a month’s worth of productivity which might of paid off later.

This weekend I haven’t got much on so am planning to spend some quality time with the laptop looking at my existing sites and seeing what I can do to improve them.

Some of my summer sites are starting to pick up quite nicely.  Some are getting quite good hit counts but not making as much sales as I’d like so I will be having a look at that.

Also my big site needs more work so that will get some time spent on it.

Fingers crossed that the final days of April will bring in a bumper harvest to help me equal last month’s total.

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?