How I Got Rich

I recently hired a virtual assistant (VA) from the Philippines via Odesk.com. Her main job is to write articles and then submit them to Unique Article Wizard (UAW). This is quite a tedious process and something I found hard to motivate myself to do so I thought that while I am subscribed to UAW I might as well pay someone to use it for me. The VA said it takes her about two hours to write the three articles and then submit them to UAW with the titles and resource box which contains two links back to my sites. This seems like a reasonable amount of time.

Free Articles from The Best Spinner

I thought I could speed this process up a bit when I heard that The Best Spinner now gives it’s users access to pre-spun articles for free (well, as part of the price you pay for TBS). I asked the VA to check it out but she said there weren’t articles on many topics, especially ones related to the niches my sites were in so it turned out to be a no goer. The Best Spinner doesn’t work on my computer, apparently due to my ISP, so I can’t test this myself.

Get Article Pro

However the VA did suggest I sign up for Get Article Pro which scrapes the web for articles which she could then submit to UAW. It costs $77 a year which if it does what it says on the tin then it will be worth it.

But is this a road I want to go down? Scraping articles, submitting them to UAW for backlinks to my sites?

It certainly would be time saving but would it bring any positive results? Unique Article Wizard seems to be working on some of my sites so I think it is worth using but should I give Get Article Pro a try, what do you think?

A good blog I’ve recently stumbled over is Nate Rivers’ Stay Blogger site. One of the latest posts is on the topic of finding good keywords to base an amazon product niche site around. In the 10 minute video he uses Market Samuari to quickly find a seed or root keyword for his site and then selects some additional keywords for the other pages that will make up the site. Its the opposite of what I do which is to write pages on individual products rather than more generic keywords. I think I like his idea better and will be giving it a try on some of my existing sites.

Its not rocket science but if you are new to affiliate marketing to want to be reminded of how easy it can be to find keywords to build a site around have a look.

Hopefully he won’t mind me embedding the video here but you can also view the video any accompanying information on his blog at:

• http://www.strayblogger.com/how-to-do-market-research-for-amazon-affiliate-sites/

What do you think? Too simplistic or a good way to research niches?

I think this must be the start of my forth year doing affiliate marketing. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month and my goal which I want to hit before the end of 2012 is £2000 per month. As of August 2011 I no longer have a day job and spend my time as a stay at home dad while trying and do a bit of affiliate marketing when I can although I’m trying to do at least two hours a day this year after letting things slide big time since about April 2011.

Link Building

This month has been very quiet. Some days I didn’t make any sales which has been quite rare for me for a long time. My main sites have mainly been travelling downward in the SERPS although a few of my older, more neglected sites have been moving in the opposite direction thanks to my building some links to them using Unique Article Wizard.

I’m still using this tool and am seeing some positive results on less competitive terms but I’m not convinced it is cut out for more competitive niches or at least not on its own. Although I’ve not been using it much as it is time consuming to write the articles and submit them. I find one article submitted tends to get published about 100-200 times and as each article can have two links this means up to 200-400 backlinks. With the two links I tend to use one of them to link to one of my sites and the other link either points at a Web 2.0 site which links back to my site or directly to one of my other related sites. I think this is better than having both links from an article pointing to the same site. I’m trying to mix up my anchor text a lot more now so my links look something like this:

< a href="http://mydogtrainingsite.com" >{dog training|dog training ideas|dog training guide|click here|more info}< /a >

I’m also building more links to my inner pages. As I said writing and submitting articles is time consuming so I’ve not got much data to see how UAW is working. But this month I’ve hired two people form Odesk to write and submit articles in UAW. They are both going to do five articles and submit them each week and are charging about $5 a go. I will see how they get on any if they are good possibly increase this amount.

I also want to try Build My Rank as I hear good things about that. The cheapest package only lets you build links for five domains so I will pick my five best sites and focus on them. Focussing only on five sites is a good idea and something I want to try in 2012. I’m really bad to doing a little bit hear and there on my many sites instead of focusing my efforts so they actually make a difference.

Content Writing

The other day I mentioned I wanted to give article writing a try and see if I can bring in a few extra pounds a month to tide me over while my earnings are low. I’ve not found anything yet but am still looking. I know it makes sense to work on my own sites but when times are hard needs must!

Monthly Affiliate Earnings

As I said it was a slow month. Perhaps after Christmas people are skint and I hear there might be a recession looming in the UK? Either way it was bad and bearing in mind I earned £1200 last January it looks even worse!

My earnings for January 2012 were £745 / $1180

This doesn’t even cover my monthly (non-affiliate marketing related) outgoings so it is pretty bad.

Goals for February 2012

Well February is a short month so that’s already off to a bad start! I’m aiming for £1000 but obviously more would be good! I’m going to focus on my top five sites and try and get them back ranking before I start thinking about my ‘strategy’ for the new year. I’m quite interested in this Video Tycoon course which sounds good but I’ve just not got the time or money to invest in something new. Although after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad earlier this month I should be saying not “I can’t afford it” but “how can I afford it?” Good book by the way and definitely worth a read!

How was your January 2012? As bad as mine or did you start the year with a bang!

Also I think I want a new WP theme for this site. Any recommendation for a free, clean theme with two columns? Thanks.

January has been one of my worst months in affiliate marketing in terms for earnings for as long as I can remember. For the first part of the month I was depressed that I didn’t have enough time or money to devote to getting my sites back where they once were and bringing in a better amount of money.

After the depression stage I started to think about other ways I could make money while at home. Then I got an email from Tom Ewer whose newsletter I signed up to from his blog Leaving Work Behind. Tom has recently become a full-time online worker deriving some of his income from affiliate marketing. Tom also makes some of his money from content writing and in his newsletter he outlined the benefits of doing this for a good source of online income.

In the past I’d not been keen on doing content writing. Working for someone else again seems like a bit of a step backwards after quitting the day job to become my own boss. Also why write for someone else when you could write for yourself and make money from the websites you publish your own content on.

But due to my decline in earnings from affiliate marketing I need to start looking for other ways to bring in some money especially now this is my only source of income after going full time.

So my question is: does anyone do content writing and what are my chances of making money from doing it?

I think I can write ok, I am a native English speaker with an honours degree (knew it would come in handy one day so what are my chances and how much could I earn?

Ideally I’d like to devote just one hour a day to it and charge £10 an hour bringing in £50 a week or $80. This would be a good amount of time vs income as it would cover my day to day living expenses but still give me time to work on my affiliate marketing projects. Is this realistic though? What if someone wanted me to write 1000 words on the symptoms of chicken pox? How long would it take me to research?

If anyone has any tips on becoming a content writer it would be great to hear from you, also if you are looking for a content writer please get in touch using the contact form on the contact page.

Better late than never I guess! Not much to report for December. None of my Christmas sites from previous years were ranking so I wasn’t expecting anything from them and I was right.

Didn’t really do much work overall as had people visiting and it was Christmas. The work I did was based around trying to claw back some of my rankings taken from me in the Google update of October. Some sites have come back but not the main ones, at least not for all their keywords they were ranking for.

Some days were really quiet in December and I actually made no sales at all which was quite rare and then other days I was making over £50.

Still using Unique Article Wizard with mixed success, it does work sometimes but depends on where you’re articles are submitted and how competitive the sites you are trying to rank are.

My Earnings for December 2011 were £1300 / $1990 gross

2011 in a Few Words

Overall 2011 has been a great year. I had some great holidays visiting some new countries (Australia, Malaysia, plus lots of places in Thailand) we had a baby, I quit my job to be a stay at home dad and full-time (more like part-time internet marketeer) and I managed to make £1840 in one month from affiliate marketing. But in purely affiliate marketing terms the year has ended on a low note. I feel three years in affiliate marketing and I still don’t really know what I am doing. If someone gave me some money and said “build a site for me that would make money” I wouldn’t be confident of being able to do so as so far my portfolio is very hit and miss. The 80/20 rule is definitely in effect! I’m still no expert on picking a niche and keywords and not much better when it comes to link building. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month which is pretty good considering the hours I put in but not yet up to my goal of £2000 per month. Now I am no longer working in a day job and I am using my internet earning for living expenses so I’ve got much less to reinvest which has slowed me down quite a bit. I really want to get earning a few extra £100 a month so I can start reinvesting again and try and boost my income.

Goals for 2012

I just want to make more money really! £2000 per month would be great, £3000 per month would be amazing. My plans are to try and improve the rankings of my top 5 earners from 2011, continue building up one of my ‘big sites’ I started last year and get some more Adsense sites up and running. A new service is being launched at the Online Income Lab where you can hire a VA through them to build a site right through from researching the keyword to installing WordPress and doing the backlinking. I’m keen to give this a go as it sounds very hands off which is good as I have little time. Also these sites should be easy to sell on flippa or just keep and get some more money coming in.

How was your 2011 and what are your plans for 2012? Is internet marketing dead?

November picked up pretty much where October left off. I didn’t get up to much in November and continued trying to get my main sites that got downranked by Google back to where they were. I was also working on getting my first 10 Adsense sites completed and with backlinks for each site. I also signed up with Unique Article Wizard to make the process of getting links for my site a bit cheaper and easier.

Unique Article Wizard

I wrote about my first impressions of this tool here and they haven’t changed much since then. I’ve used it a lot more and have found that if I select the categories for the articles correctly, for some niches, I can get about 400 submissions per article. I’ve been setting the Wizard to only do 20 submissions per day so I don’t overload my sites with links. Due to this slow submission rate most of my jobs are yet to complete. For some sites I have seen an upwards move in the SERPS but for some others I have not. I guess it depends on how competitive the niche is, how good your site is, what other links you’ve got and what the competition is like. I’m going to keep using the tool for now but I’m not 100% sold.

Adsense Sites

After following the guys over at Niche Pursuits and Online Income Lab I couldn’t help myself from giving this type of internet marketing a try, especially with my other product niche sites floundering! In November I managed to finally get my first 10 Adsense sites finished. Some have multiple pages of content and some just have one page and nearly all have got some backlinks to them now. I’ve been buying quality content from The Content Authority but its not cheap so haven’t got much money left to invest this month which is a shame. I have bought another 10 domains for keywords which I found with SECockpit which is one of the best tools I’ve used. As I’ve no money to invest this month I’m going to try and write one 1000 word article for each of these sites myself. As the topics are pretty varied this might take a while but its better than not doing anything even if its not particularly time efficient. I’ve also been adding videos to these sites that I’ve had made on Fiverr.com and added to Youtube for an extra backlink. Seems like a relatively easy and cheap way to get backlinks and add different content to the sites. None of the first 10 sites are ranking in Google yet but I got a couple of clicks this month. I’m going to keep going with this approach and see if I can do 10 sites a month for the next six months or so.

Overview

November was pretty poor when it came to my sites rankings and earnings. I had little time to do much but tried to squeeze as many hours in as I could. Since my sites got hit by Google I’ve started to think I’ve gone about this game the wrong way. My lots of little sites approach didn’t really work in the end and I’ve now got too many sites to try and repair. Once I get a bit more money to invest I’m going to build up my best five sites and then try and build another five sites but build them with better, longer content and go for some slightly more competitive niches. I can’t be arsed to go after the tiny niches anymore that get you one or two sales a month and don’t bring in hardly any money.
It was ok before when they ranked without much effort but now Google is penalising those sites they would take too much work to rank in this day and age.

Other Affiliates

I read a great post from the Affiliate Musketeer who has been doing affiliate marketing as long as me (I think) but got off to a bit of a slow start but has now found his formula and is doing well. I was pleased to read his latest blog post but was also a bit jealous as it wasn’t so long ago I made £1800 in a month. I’m hoping for a Kindle for Christmas so if anyone has a copy of those books lying around feel free to lend them to me via email.

Earnings for November 2011

Like I said at the top this month carried on from October although this month I did slightly worse, continuing the downwards slide. I made £1.50 from my Adsense sites which was nice I suppose but not enough to pick up the slack from my product sites!

Last month I earned £1440 from affiliate marketing which was down from September but this month:

My gross earnings for November 2011 were: £1200 / $1870

So a drop of over £200 in one month. Some of this is down to losing top spots in Google while some of it due to my seasonal sites going out of season. I’ve not done anything to my old Christmas sites from previous years so I’m not expecting much of an increase in December.

Next Month

My goal for the end of 2011 was to be making £2000 per month but unless something major happens I’m going to be far short of that target. It’s been a good year in many ways but my earnings have been a bit disappointing but with the amount of time I’ve put into my sites in the last six months I can’t complain too much. I’m looking forward to the end of the year when I can work out my monthly average for 2011, have a little cry/cheer and then start the new year with a better game plan!

How was your November 2011?

Warning: this post is riddled with affiliate links!

Last week I signed up for Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you post articles to the blogs and article directories in their network. It’s web based so you log into the site and then enter your article and they do the rest of the work. This might sound pretty simple but their interface isn’t that great.

You can paste in an article in spintax form that you have spun somewhere else, perhaps in The Best Spinner or you can submit an article and two rewrites of that article. This is the option I have used so far and is probably the best for people who don’t like spinning or don’t own any spinning software.

What type of Content can you Submit?

When it comes to submitting an article and two rewrites into Unique Article Wizard the articles and rewritten versions need to have the same amount of paragraphs (seven plus). The paragraphs are then interchanged to make lots of different articles. For this reason paragraph one in each article and rewrite must be on the same topic but written differently. Same for paragraph two and so on. You also need to submit lots of unique titles to help improve the submission rates. For one of my articles I ordered two rewrities of an article I had previously ordered from The Content Authority. This was quite expensive so for the second article I hired someone from Odesk who charged $5 to write a 500 word article and then do two rewrites of it. Both articles got accepted so I guess the cheaper one from Odesk was good enough. Unique Article Wizard also offer an article writing service and charge $9.99 for an article and two rewrites. You could always write them yourself though!

Inserting Links

You can put two links in your article with at least one going in the resource box. This means you can put a link in the body of the text but when I tried this I found that some of my articles had this link removed. For this reason I recommend you put both links in the resource box. You can spin the resource box and the links so you can link to lots of sites and/or pages in one submission.

Submission Rates

You can choose how many times a day you want your article to be submitted. The minimum is 20, I’m not sure what the maximum is but for my articles, so far, I have chosen 50. In the future I think I will do 20 to make it look at bit more natural. It takes a few days for the submission to kick in after you have entered your article but then each day you get an email with a list of the submissions that have been made. So far I have only submitted two articles and both have gotten about 160 submission.

Index Rates

I’ve only submitted two articles so far but for the first article it went down like this:

• Submissions: 162
• Indexed: 95

and the other one went like this:

• Submissions: 159
• Indexed: 99

These are only after a few days of the job being completed so there is a chance more could get indexed over the coming days and weeks. You could always put the URLs of the non-indexed articles into a pinger or indexer and speed things up a bit. A good old fashioned Scrapebox or Xrummer blast probably wouldn’t hurt either.

SERP Movement

I used one submission on a new site and linked to a set of Web 2.0 sites that link to my site. Therefore none of these links went directly to the money site. That site hasn’t moved in the SERPs.

For the other submission I used it on different site. I used one link to link directly to the money site and the other link was spun and linked to one of 10 Web 2.0 sites that link back to my money site. This site moved from #7 to #4 in the SERPs. Although until the recent Google update that occurred mid-October it had been #1 for this keyword.

Final Thoughts

So with nearly 100 indexed posts for each article, and as each article contains two links I got 200 new backlinks to my sites for each submission. This sounds pretty good. But looking at the sites the articles are submitted to, they aren’t the best and if you are not writing the articles yourself it could get quite expensive especially when you factor in the $67 per month subscription fee.

If you have already hired a virtual assistant with time on their hands this might be a good way to keep them busy. Or if you have a cheap source of content who is able to do spinning or rewrites then you could make the most of this tool.

Doing it on the Cheap

One approach could be to write and spin/rewrite a load of articles. Sign up for one month and submit all those articles. Get them published then cancel your account. The articles should stay where they were published and you will have gotten your links and only paid up for one month. You might want to check how many articles you can submit a day and what does happen to your articles once you leave the programme.

I’m going to stick with it for a while as I am using it to try and rank my new Adsense sites but I’m not entirely convinced so far. But the proof will be in the pudding and if it gets my sites ranked and they make money then it will have worked. I guess it all comes down to results and if you can make the most of the tools you are using…

• Link to Unique Article Wizard: http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

A cheaper alternative would be the Article Marketing Robot which does a similar job but is installed on your computer and runs from there rather than being web based. It has a much larger list of sites you can submit to but it will take up your machines resources as it does so. It is a one time fee rather than monthly subscription and they do offer a free 5 day trial so go check it out.

October started off really well for me and I was earning on average £60 a day which meant I was on target to equal my best month of about £1850. But then around October 14 something went wrong!

Panda will get you in the End!

There was a Google update which I think was part of the infamous Panda and my sites took a hit. I had escaped the previous updates that made up Panda but was not so lucky this time. Nearly all my sites took a hit. Sites that were exact match domains still ranked for their main keywords but any long tail keywords they ranked for got knocked right down the SERPs. Sites like amazon, ebay and wikipedia seemed to benefit most from the update, at least in the niches I am targeting and I lost out to them for most of my long tail. I went from earning £60 a day to £30 a day overnight!

Before and After October 14 2011

Another site Before and After October 14 2011

Private Blog Network Deindexed

As part of my link building I have been buying posts on private blog networks. These services are advertised on sites like Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum to mention just two. They might not be to everyone’s tastes but they were working well for me and I was getting a good return on my investment. However, as part of this Google update (or at least at the same time) one blog network I was using got de-indexed which removed all my backlinks from those sites. It wasn’t the only blog network I was using but it still affected some of my sites quite badly. I know people will say it serves me right for using such services but they do work and I still made money while my sites were well ranked. It might not have been as long term as I’d liked but I did get a positive effect. I’m still going to use them in the future but if anyone has any suggestions of better places to get links I’d love to hear them.

Unique Article Wizard

I finally bit the bullet and signed up with Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you submit your spun articles to other peoples’ blogs and directories. I posted about signing up before and didn’t get very good feedback but two people I’ve been following lately (Spencer @ Niche Pursuits and Trent @ Online Income Lab) swear by it so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s too early to tell if it has any effect but to read about how it can be used go here: http://onlineincomelab.com/backlinking-strategy/

• If you want to know more about the Unique Article Wizard click here on my affiliate link.

Other Stuff I Did In October

Apart from crying when my sites got hit I didn’t do much work in October. We went on holiday to Penang in Malaysia for a week at half term which was really good. The food was amazing, much better than Thailand I am afraid to say, and so cheap to eat out at the best curry places. There wasn’t free Wifi in the hotels but it wasn’t too expensive – about £10 a day – so I did a few hours of work but not much. As the floods started to get closer to Bangkok my partner’s school was shut so we got an unexpected two weeks off work. We decided to go away again and went to Koh Chang, one of the Thai islands. This time the hotel had free wifi so I managed to do a few hours a day of work which felt good as I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed with what to do next and how I could try and fix my sites or whether to give it all up and get a proper job.

Lifestyle Affiliates

While I was away it got me thinking about what I would do if I could start over again. As the cost of living is so cheap out here in South East Asia I would recommend to anyone who is just starting out and who is making a couple of £100 a month to save up and move out here. Get a little place by the sea, lock yourself away and work your socks off without all the stresses of high overheads back home. You will get a good holiday and can hopefully lay down some good foundations on your internet business while you have little distractions. Of course if you have a mortgage and family this isn’t an option but for those that are young, free and and single: go for it!

Earnings for October 2011

Last month I earned £1490 which was pretty good and although this month started off well by the middle of the month it was clear I wasn going to be lucky to beat that.

My gross earnings for October 2011 were: £1439.29 / $2309

Not bad considering what happened mid-month but a bit disappointing when you look at how well things started off. The downward slump is continuing which is a shame. Pretty sure I won’t hit my long-term goal of £2000 a month by the end of the year.

Goals for November 2011

You can read what I am thinking about doing in my What Would You Do with $1000 post.

My main focus for November will be to get 5 Adsense niche sites up and running with 8-10 pages on and some backlinks for each.

Alongside that I will be trying my hardest to get my existing sites back to where they were. I will pick the five top earners from the last couple of months and focus on them for now. I will be adding content to them and getting them a few links where I can.

How was your October and what are you goals for the last few months of the year?

I haven’t done my earnings report for October yet but it wasn’t a particuarly good month for me what with the Google update that happened mid month negatively affecting nearly all of my sites.

The dissapointment has got me thinking its time to shake things up a bit.

I have £650 / $1000 in my Webgains affiliate account that I was saving for a rainy day but I think its time to withdraw the money and try and invest it into something that will boost my earnings.

Here are my thoughts so far on what to do with $1000 to increase my affiliate marketing income:

10 Adsense Niche Sites: I’ve been following the work of Spencer (Niche Pursuits) and Trent (Online Income Lab) who make good money from multiple Adsense sites. In a recent podcast Trent spoke of how these sites should be looked at as an investment. They can be setup with content and backlinks for about $100 each and with the money I could setup 10. In a few months I could sell the top earner and the bottom five earners for about $1000 and then do another 10.

This sounds appealing to me at the moment but I am also skeptical as I’ve not managed to rank my existing (phystical product niche) sites very quickly or consistently.

One Adsense Authoriy Site: On Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog he has documented how he made an Adsense niche site that, by adding more and more content to, turned into an authority site that makes $1500 a month from lots of long tail keywords.

This idea also appeals to me as I have long been interested in building a big site but have struggled to devote my resources to it. With the $1000 I could order a load of articles and start building something for the long term. Although this idea is quite risky as 1) if I didn’t pick a good niche or keyword I would loose all the money and 2) if the site ever got penalised or down-ranked by Google all my eggs would be in one basket.

Spencer has also started a large site like this which you can read about here but lets be honest I’m no Spencer (or Pat).

Fix What I Have Already: I could take my top five performing sites and invest $200 in the them to make them even stronger (or get them back to where they were before Panda).

This idea isn’t very appealing as I wouldn’t really know what to do to them to get the most from the money. Buy more links? Add more content? This might be the most sensible idea as at least I know what I am working with but should I take more of a risk?

Something Else Altogether: I imagine it will be at least a week before the money comes through so that gives me some time to think things over. I’d love to hear from people if they have any advice or tips. Alternatively I could use the money to buy a new laptop which might increase my productivity!

So, what would you do with £650 / $1000 in order to boost your internet marketing earnings?

None of the previous Panda updates have affected my sites except for one site which got knocked down a few places or pages depending on the keyword. It didn’t take that long for the site to return to number one though although it was my biggest earner at the time and I lost a few quid.

Now though, after what I presume is the release of Panda 2.5, my sites’ rankings have been decimated! I checked a few sites the other day to see where they are in the SERPs as I do fairly regularly and I saw they had lost their number one spots for some of their main keywords. The morning I noticed the drop in rankings was the morning I was leaving for a weeks holiday in Malaysia. Not a good way to start a trip!

I was taking my laptop with me but wasn’t expecting to do any work as my sites were doing ok. Now that they are all falling out of the SERPs that plan might have to change.

This month was going pretty well and I’d had quite a few days where I made over £50 but since the drop I’ve only made a few pounds.

I haven’t had much time to read up on what has happened. Has anyone else noticed anything?

What are people doing to try and claw back their rankings? It looks like Amazon has come out pretty well of this from looking at the niches where I have sites.

Never a dull moment eh?