How I Got Rich

Day One of the New Regime

After yesterday’s decision to turn over a new leaf regarding my affiliate marketing efforts I had quite a productive day.

I started work at 8.45am after going to the gym and having breakfast and worked through to 11.30am when I stopped for an hour to make and eat lunch.   During that 2hr 45m session I started on my latest site and added 10 product write-ups for it with each being between 100 and 200 words.

After lunch I finished the site off by adding the contact, about, discliamer and privacy policy site and did a link exchage for it and submitted it to digg to get it indexed.  The site is now ready and I will add new product posts to it as the weeks go on.

At about 2.15pm I started work on another micro niche site for a single product.  I used an existing template of mine and had most of the site ready by 3pm when I stopped work for the afternoon and headed out to Bangkok’s Chinatown.

I got in at around 8.30pm and half worked, half browsed the web whilst finishing off the new micro niche site.  The Internet was very slow so didn’t get much done.

I went to bed at about 12.30am feeling quite pleased that I had got one site up and running and almost finished off another one.

If I can keep this up I should be able to get a couple of new sites up and running each week whilst still being able to add content to existing ones.  My goal is to be making £100o a month by Christmas.

Today hasn’t been as productive as the apartments were getting fumigated to I went over to Starbucks to work.  I did about four hours there until the laptop had run out of battery.  I went back home but they had not finished so I sat by the pool reading for a few hours.  This afternoon I have been finishing off the micro nice site and fixing an old site I have just noticed wasn’t rendering properly for some reason.  Tonight I will start a new site and hope to get five products listed on it.

I’m determined to make this work as I can’t face another month of seeing one or two pounds commission coming in most days being the norm.

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.

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 For Summer

I launced a new site last week (#24) and it made its first sale yesterday.

This is another keyword niche domain site and is for a niche that will probably only get sales in the summer.

When I was researching the keywords I must have had the Google Keyword Tool set to broad because when I checked it just now it was 9,900 rather than the 60,000 I thought it was!  Oh dear.

I also registered the domain with an abbreviation of the keywords as that gets a large amount of searches too.  I was initially going to park this domain but now as it turns out to get more searches than the domain I started working on I think I will develop it.

I’ve not worked on two different sites in the same niche before so I will have to be careful not to duplicate any content.

Right, I’m off to go and recheck the last batch of domains I registered using the Google Keyword Tool but making sure I select ‘exact’ match this time!

New Site Launched!

Registered a couple of new domains this week and have just got the first site built.

This site will be known as site #19 and has been made using HTML & CSS and is based around the template of one of my most popular sites so far.  I decided to give WordPress a miss this time as although it is easy to setup and use I miss the customizability you get with an HTML site.

I have used ECU to make a basic price comparison page but the main landing page just has product descriptions with links to the merchants.  This is the method that has worked best for me so far.  All items are over£40 so I should get at least £2 per sale.  The exact local search volume for April 2009 was 14,000 so if I get to the top of page one I should get 40% of that which is 5,600 hits per month.  If 1% of those visitors buys the cheapest item I will earn £112 per month.    A lot of ifs there but we shall see…

To get the site indexed I have bookmarked it in digg, delicious and left one comment on a new blog.  If it doesn’t get indexed in the next few days I will do the Gumtree method.