How I Got Rich

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.

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?

I just read this little book and thought I’d give it a mention on this blog as it has given my a bit of a kick start.  I’ve been slacking off a bit of late when it comes to affiliate marketing and after reading this book I can see when I started taking things a bit too easy and why I did so.

It all started when I stopped making financial progress and got worse when I started making less money each month.  Instead of looking around for new things to do or trying to see see how I could adapt and change to turn things around I just stopped and thought about how unfair it was and how things should pick up eventually if I waited.

The book is all about just that, although using cheese as a metaphor instead of affiliate marketing.

Here is a (affiliate link) to it at amazon.co.uk

It only took an hour to read.  Anyone got any tips for other books to help you get motivated?

I am soon going to have  go at financial leads and life insurance affiliate marketing in particular.  As I will be paying per click I need to be sure my website is of high quality and converts well.

My keyword domain site on a .org.uk domain had worked its way up to the top half of page one and had been there for a while.  It was getting a few hits a day and making a few sales a month.  Today I checked my stats as I do most days and noticed it was no longer on page but the .co.uk version of the domain was sitting at number two!

I’m pretty certain when I bought the domain that although the .co.uk was registered there was no site on it – otherwise I wouldn’t have tried to compete with it as its a bit cheeky to use the same domain as an existing site in a small niche.

From doing a site: in Google I can see it has about 150 pages against my 10 or so so I guess the better site has won.   For now…

To my untrained eye it does look like they are using some kind of feed to generate all the pages for the site.  This is something I would like to try myself but have no idea where to start.  Any ideas?

One of my sites got 666 unique visits last month and from that site there were 389 clicks through to the merchant (amazon). Those 389 clicks were split over five products that are featured on the site.

So far so good but the bad news it no one bought anything. The items all appear to be in stock. The prices aren’t listed on my website so maybe the users weren’t aware of the cost of the items and decided not to buy once they reached the merchant.

Whatever the reason I find these figures pretty bad. Even if the item the user clicked through to wasn’t to their taste I would have expected at least some of them to have a look around amazon and find an item more suited to their needs.

The item is something I would expect to sell well online as you don’t need to see it in the flesh to buy it as you probably wouldn’t get to do that in the shops as it would stay in its box. Plus it is quite big so I would’ve guessed users would’ve rather have it delivered than go and buy it from the shop and try and get it home themselves.

Has anyone seen anything like this? Got any tips on how I can turn it around to make a few sales?

My credit card has expired and due to my location I have been able to get another one.  This has lead to my Adwords account getting suspended.

Does anyone know of a way around this?  Any tips, other ways to pay?

Cheers.

Last month was pretty good bringing in around £600 (mainly thanks to one sale that bagged me £100) but April has been back to normal seeing me earn around £470 from affiliate marketing after I deducted my £40 AdWords spend.

This is a nice amount for little effort but its a bit depressing that I haven’t made any real progress in the past 9-10 months or so.

I have made new sites that make sales but as they get stronger my other sites don’t perform as well.  My big site is yet to rank for any keywords that people are searching for but I will keep on keeping on with it.

Ideally I’d like to triple my incone in the next 7 months or so but I can’t see where the breakthrough will come.

Any suggestions?

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.

This is the conclusion to my short test to compare the Google Keyword Tool records against Adwords advert impressions to see if they match up.

I believe the results of the Google Keyword Tool to be wildly overoptimistic but I wanted to findout by how much.  I setup an Ad for a keyword one of my sites is ranked number two for in Google.

For March 2010 the GKWT says there were 12,100 exact searches  for my keyword.

My ad, when it was on page one in Google got around 200 impressions per day.

The ad only ran for two weeks but the impressions stayed around the 200 per day mark during this time.

200 per day x 31 days = 6,200 searches.

So it looks like the GKWT is reporting 100% more searches than the number of impressions the advert received.

Also during my site was only get about 3-6 unique hits per day (nearly all from organic SERPS) which is a click through rate of about 3% for being number two in Google which sucks big time!

It would be interesting to see if other people got the same results but at the end of the day its probably not worth the effort.