How I Got Rich

Monthly Round-up for August 2010

Don’t think I have done one of these for a while but as I am now back from my holidays I thought I better do a quick one for August.

I was away for the first three weeks of August (as well as July) so didn’t do that much work on my sites but the main thing I have been doing is the outsourcing of the acquisition of forum profile back links (you can read how I did this on this blog). I ordered them in batches of 120 and did it for four of my sites but its been over a week now and the links are not showing up in any backlink checks I’ve done so cannot say if they have made a difference or not. I doubt these links are very high quality but they’ve got to be better than nothing.

I’m still outsourcing written content which is really helping my sites as I’m too busy/lazy to write my own content these days and this way allows me to get good, fresh content for my sites. Have a look on ODesk and see if you can find a good writer if you are interested in doing this.

I still haven’t gotten around to trying out the financial leads through the Affiliate Marketing School as I am still scared of losing lots of money on PPC but I will bite the bullet one day – maybe once some money starts coming through from AWin.

My ‘big site’ is still not ranking at all which sucks. I’ve done about 50 200 word product pages for the desired keyword and its still not on the first 60 pages of Google and judging by some of the other pages in the top 600 the competition isn’t that stiff. This is my first site which does not have the keyword in the domain and I’m now realising just how much a keyword domain helps.

I’ve also started three new keyword niche sites this month after a long time of not starting any new sites. None of them are particularly good niches as they get pretty low hits but they might bring in a few quid each month which is nothing to complain about but not really the road I want to keep going down long term (lots of little sites).

What I am thinking about at the moment is moving from getting a large slice of a small pie to getting a small slice of a big pie. At the moment my sites do quite well in the SERPS (apart from my big site) but the niches are pretty low traffic so even if I get to number 1 in Google and take a large slice of the niche pie I still don’t get much money. But now I am thinking to maybe go after a more competitive niche but aim to get in the bottom half of page 1 and just have a smaller slice of the much bigger niche pie. To do this I will still need a keyword domain but as they are all gone in the competitive niches I might start appending them with buy_____.co.uk or _______store.co.uk as I’ve seen other people doing this. I don’t really like the idea of muscling into niches in which other affiliates are already operating but people are doing this to me now so maybe its time I started doing it too. What do you think readers?

This month my profits were up about 10% on last month which I am pleased about and I will be aiming to do the same next month.

In September I will be mostly working on my Christmas site – it’s only 3 months away!

WordPress Sites Not Indexing Correctly

I’ve recently ‘launched’ a few new sites built using WordPress and none of them have fully indexed.  The home page is indexed but none of the other posts or meta data is indexed in Google.

Thanks to gary_ap on the A4U forum I have found out that there is a new setting in WordPress that by default is set to ‘I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors’ to view the site.

I have since changed this setting to ‘I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers’ and my robots.txt file has been updated and hopefully my sites will be indexed fully soon.

This setting can be found under:

• Settings
• Privacy

Case Study | Getting Indexed

My first attempt to get the site indexed was to post a link to it from this blog.  New posts on this blog get indexed within a few hours so I thought this would be a good place to post a link but as it was pointed out to me this site cloaks its links so that approach would not work.

Next I decided to put a link to the site in the signature of my profile on A4U but after a few days it has still not been indexed so I have gone down the tried and tested route of submitting the site to Digg.com

Should be indexed any day now…

New Site Launched

I’ve finished the design of a new site (#26) and put in a bit of content so its ready to be indexed.

Normally when a site gets indexed it tends to go straight into page one in Google for a few days and then if Google decides it is worthy of page one it will stay but more often than not it gets shunted down the ranks to page 10 and beyond!

Due to this I now always make sure my site had a fair few affiliate links on before it gets indexed.  This means that I have a good chance of converting some of the page one traffic it will gets before Google sends it off to page 10.  Another site I launched last week did this and managed to make a few sales before it left page one.  Hopefully the sites will return and make some decent sales but its nice to get a few quid out of them before they head off to exile.

This new site is for a type of tool and got 33,100 exact searches in June 2009.  If I get to number one in Google I’d expect 5% of that number in hits per month which is equal to 1,650 hits per month.  If 10% of those resulted in a sale I could be looking at ( {average comission = £1.50} x {10% of 1,650 hits per month = 165} ) £247 per month.  Highly unlikely but worth a punt nevertheless.

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.

Today’s Progress

Two of my sites were indexed today (#13 & #14).  One was straight in on page one and the other wasn’t in the first 10 pages of google.

I also started work on another blog (#17) which I will be working on as a long term project and not be promoting a specific line of products on for now.  I will hope to add around five posts to it a week with the aim of building up a large amount of content which should get me a wide range of organic traffic.