How I Got Rich

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!

Knock me down with a feather – another £50 day

Another good day in the run up to Christmas.  Yesterday I tweaked my Adwords ads and updated some of my ECUs that were pointing to out of stock merchants and today I have a lower PPC spend and have made more commission.

Break down goes a little something like this:

• Awin: £42
• Amazon: £26
• Adwords: £14
• Profit: £54

Obviously these are all pending but I’ve not had many rejections so far (touch wood) and PPC spend isn’t in sync with sales as there are time zone issues afoot but overall it looks positive.

I’d love to spend today checking my sites and setting up some new campaigns but as regular reader may know I recently started a new part-time day job.  Although the job is only one day a week it also takes a full day to prepare so unfortunately today and tomorrow will be affiliate marketing free apart from the odd bit of stolen time.  I am quite gutted as I only get £35 for the day of work (which actually takes two days) and I could earn more than that from Internet marketing but its not all about the money right?

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.

Christmas Sites Ahoy!

I know I left it very late but I have finally got two Christmas sites up.  They are both about a single toy I think will be popular this Christmas.  One costs about £50 and the other about £20.  I think I’ve left it too late for them to be indexed and ranked well so I have started a PPC campaign for each one.  Hopefully they will get some action before the big day.

The campaign I started yesterday has already had a few clicks which have lead to clicks through to the merchant but no sales as of yet.  I am quite confident I will make some sales as my sites have the lowest prices on them thanks to an ECU unit.

I’ve got two or three more Christmas domains so will be working on getting those sites up and running by the end of the weekend.

How are your Christmas sites doing?

New Buttons at Easy Content Units

If you use Easy Content Units on your site you will be pleased to know they have added some new buttons to choose from.  The existing ones are still there but there is now a ’shop now’ button and the existing buttons have all had a re-design giving them a more web 2.0 look.  You can see them in action on the ECU below:

Atomic Niche Site Update

I started a micro niche or atomic niche site a while ago for an item that retails for about £1000.

I built the site using the product model number as the domain and then put an Easy Content Unit price comparison widget on the home page.  I left the site to see how well it would rank organically and it got to number two in Google after a few weeks.  It was getting about five hits a day but no sales.  I left the site as I assumed the item was too expensive and that not many people were searching for the item.

Recently I have been looking into PPC and AdWords and thought I would give promoting this site using PPC a go using the new things I have learnt in that area.

Today I logged into Affiliate Window and saw that the site had made a sale! The item sold  for £1,158.00 which got me £19.58 in commission.  10% would’ve been nice, or even 5% but in this case I will have to settle for 1.5% thanks to those stingy b*~tards at Dixons!

I think I will setup another one of these sites soon…

I paid for 58 clicks which cost me £12 so I will only make about £8 on this one but it is a start.

Update: I have since made another sale from a different merchant which got me £31.91 commission.  This has come from 68 clicks which cost me £14.69 giving me a total profit of £36.80 so far.  I am happy with that and think I will build a couple more of these sites.  If I had 10 up and running performing like this that would be £300 per month.

Update II: Another sale through today for £852.17 which brought me £17.04 which is about a 2% commission rate.  PPC spend is now at £15.18 which gives me a gross profit of £68.53 and a net total profit of £53.35.  I will definitely be making a few more of this type of site this week.  Just need to find out which merchants offer decent commission rates as 1% is pretty poor.

Update III: Another sale for this site came through today which brought in  £29.88 commission from a sale of £995.99 (3% commission rate).   This brings the gross profit up to £98.41 which after deducting the PPC spend of £20.25 leaves a net profit of £78.16.  The other sites I made in this style after this one are yet to make a sale but it’s early days.

Update IV: Bah! The sale from update III has been decline.  This was £29.88 of commission I thought was comming my way but according the Affiliate Windows data it has been ‘web declined’.  Not sure what that means?

Update V: Another sale for the site, still no action on the other sites though.  This one gets £15.93 commission from a sale of £796.52 although this is still pending.  This brings the gross profit for this site up to £64.88 and with a PPC spend of £21.29 the net profit stands at £43.59.

New Atomic Niche Site Launched

I’ve almost finished a new atomic niche site.

The logo links at the bottom of the page are yet to be set but apart from that it is ready to go.

I wonder how quickly the site will get indexed if I only post a link to it from this blog?

The site is about the a Tefal slow cooker and uses an Easy Content Unit for its price comparison feature. The rest of the site I build by hand using HTML, CSS and a touch of PHP. The item retails for about £40 from the cheapest merchant so will land me about £2 per sale (if bought from the lowest priced merchant).  This isn’t much but as my last atomic / micro site was for an item that cost £1,000 I am hoping this one might get more action as I think its easier to ’sell’ lower priced items as the user is more likely to make a purchase on the spot.

Picking the Niche:

The main thing stopping me making more atomic / micro niche sites is that it is hard to find out whether an item will be something people will be searching for or not.  With a generic niche you can use the Google Keyword Tool to see how many people search for the niche per month.  As atomic niches get much less traffic as they are more targeted the GKT will often say ‘not enough data’ in the search results.  This makes it hard to know if the product you have chosen will get any searches and without any searches you will not get any traffic and without any traffic you will not make any money.  So how did I pick this niche? I thought of a niche – slow cookers – then went to Amazon and picked one with good reviews, that wasn’t too old and that over 75% of the people who had viewed it in Amazon had bought.  I also checked that lots of places sold it so I can do a proper price comparison that would hopefully entice the user to buy then and there as they were sure they were getting a good deal.  I also looked at the natural SERPS for the item to check out the competition.  The Amazon product page for the RK701115 was number one so to me that was a good indicator that I could get to number one as I have beaten Amazon product pages in the past.  That was all I had to go on but I had ticked all my boxes so off I went and registered the domain name and the next day the site was ready.

Promoting the Site:

I am aiming to get the site ranked well organically but if that does not work out I will try promoting it using PPC. If I am paying 10p per click I will need to be making a sale every 20 clicks to break even. If I can make  one sale every 10 clicks that should get me £1 profit per sale.  I would be happy with that provided I make a few sales per day (3.3 sales a day would get me £100 a month which would be great) .  But then how many people are going to be searching for a slow cooker each day?

I’ll be adding comments to this post to track my progress and see if this site sinks or swims.

Easy Content Units

I hear the pro version of Easy Content Units as been released.

I will stay with the free version for now as I haven’t had much luck with them so far.

I am hoping this is down to the fact I entered by details for Affiliate Window incorrectly so no clicks or sales were tracked.  Now I have rectified this hopefully I will make my first sale through an ECU shortly.

So far I had been using them just for their price comparison ability but on a couple of new sites I have been sticking an ECU right at the top of the page after the headings so the user will see a selection of products as soon as they land on the page.  Will this put them off or encourage them to click through to the merchants? I am hoping the latter but time will tell.

Have you had any luck with Easy Content Units?

How are you using them?

One of my sites has been added to the showcase page on the ECU website,  if you can guess which one it is you can have a prize.

Another New Site

Another new site was setup and indexed this weekend.  I will be referring to this site as #20.  I made it over a couple of days based on my standard template using HTML, CSS and a touch of PHP.

I bookmarked it in digg, delicious and twitter and it was indexed less than 12 hours later finding itself in the top half of page one in Google.  According to the Google Keyword Tool the keyword this site is based around got 6,600 exact matches in April (last month) in the UK.  So far it hasn’t had any hits from being on page one in the SERPS so we shall see…

The site doesnt have too much content at present and I am experimenting with Easy Content Units a bit more by placing the ECU right at the front of the page showing a selection of products and their prices rather than the usual price comaprison I have been using it for.

I’ve started on another site in a similar niche using the same layout but haven’t had the motivation to finish it off and have been working on existing sites instead as they are making me money so get my time.  Both these new sites are for items costing over £100 so if they do make some sales I should be looking at some healthy commissions for a change. I have also registered another domain for a site in a similar niche which I will probably get to work on when I get back from my holidays.