How I Got Rich

Maximising a Niche

After reading a few blog posts on people making $1000s a day from amazon.com niche sites I’ve been thinking more about making the most of my niches.

Up until very recently I’d just aim to rank my site for its main keyword (which would be in the domain) and then leave it at that. Sometimes I would add on a few posts or pages or related products but I had no expectations of ranking for those terms and just had them there in case any users who found my site got tempted by the on-page menu.

But after doing a bit of experimenting with backlinks I can see that it wouldn’t be too hard to rank for some more longer tail keywords. So from now on I am going to work on adding related pages to lots of my existing sites and trying to get them to rank.

For example if I had a jack hammer website selling pneumatic drills I would then add a page for Draper Jack Hammers and try and rank for that. Then I would add a page for each brand that makes jack hammers.

After that I would have a look in my Google Analytics and StatCounter stats and see what keywords people were searching for and ending up on my site. Using that data I would start building pages around those keywords so if someone had found my site by searching for ‘jack hammer tips’ and my site was on page 2 for that term then I would build a page around the keyword ‘jack hammer tips’ with the aim of getting it to page 1. The idea being that if one person searched for that term and found my site on page 2 there might be other people searching for that term who might find my site when its on page 1.

Then I would go to Google and type in Jack Hammer and look at what the auto-complete text was. This gives you suggestions of what people will be prompted to search for by Google. Build a few pages for some of the terms that come up.

Next you can do a search for your main keyword such as ‘Jack Hammers’ and then scroll down to the bottom of the SERPS and see what Google has listed under its ‘Searches related to ‘ area. This will give you some more ideas for search terms to target on your site.

Once you’ve done all that you can go out and get backlinks for all your new pages.

Anyone got any other tips for making the most out of a niche?

How to Pick a Big Niche for my Big Site

In prepartion for me giving up the day job and becoming a full-time affiliate marketeer in about seven months I am planning to work on a ‘big site’ from now to then with the goal of it bringing in ₤1000 a month by around July 2011.

Along with the income from my other sites this should cushion the blow of leaving my job and cover the bills until my full time earnings kick in.

The main thing stopping me from starting this big site is deciding on what area or niche to set the site in.

I’ve got three ideas I think are worth a punt but I am very wary of picking the wrong one. I am aware of ‘paralysis by analysis’ which is all too common in new affiliates starting out but seeing as I’ve never really made a successful site so far I don’t want to get it wrong.

My criteria for this project is the following:

• Products must not be seasonal – or at least not completely die out for parts of the year
• Products must cost over ₤50: so that they bring in at least ₤2.50 per sale of which I will need 400 per month at this price which is 14 a day to reach my target.  Increase the product price to ₤100 and I will need just seven sales a day.  This is very rough as commission rates vary between merchants.
• Lots of the merchants operating in this area must have affiliate programmes.  Don’t want to be competing with brands or merchants that I can’t promote on my site.
• Cannot promote with PPC.  Due to my run in with Google Adwords I can no longer get traffic via Adwords so it must be a product type/area/niche I can promote via SEO and get traffic via the organic search results.

Ideas on a postcard please!

Forgotten About Sites

I was checking my Amazon stats this morning as I do each morning and noticed some sales from a site I had forgotten about.  I hadn’t setup and tracking for the site in StatCounter so never saw it in my list of sites and therefore had forgotten about it.  It looked like one person had bought quite a few things which was nice so I looked up the site to see what state it was in.

Most of the links are still to active products and the site is now number two in Google for a 22,000 exact match keyword according to the Google Key Word Tool which is nice to see.  Further examination of my sales stats shows it has been making the odd sale here and there over the past few weeks and months.

I’m now going to update any dead links on the site and add a bit more content and see if I can get it to number one.  The items on the site sell for well over £50 and are not sold in many shops so on paper it sounds like a pretty good niche.

Fingers crossed…

Battle of the Affiliates

The first affiliate site I ever setup has been number one in Google for a while now but recently I noticed another affiliate site creeping up the SERPS and yesterday it had made it to number two, just one place behind mine.  The site belongs to schteev and has used some similar text content to mine but I’m sure that is just a coincidence.

This site only makes a few quid a month but as it is my first site I would quite like it to remain at number one for sentimental reasons as it was the site that showed me that it is possible to make money from affiliate marketing.

My site uses the .co.uk domain extension whilst my rival is using the .org.uk extension.  My site was made using HTML, CSS and a little bit of PHP whilst the other site uses WordPress.

I hadn’t updated the site in a long time but since the other site got to number two I have added a couple more pages in a bid to hold on to my position.

Although I think it is a bit out of order to try and muscle in on another affiliates site, especially in a very small niche, it should be interesting to see how it pans out.

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!

Where is my site Google?

Yesterday I saw that one of my sites that had recently made it to the number one spot was no where to be seen in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). This wasn’t one of my main earning sites but it made me realise that this could happen to any of my sites and if it were to happen to a big earner I’d be in trouble!

I hadn’t registered any new domains for a while as I had decided to work on my existing sites and try and get them ranking a bit better. But after Google’s treatment of one of my well ranked sites I decided I better get some more sites up and running to try and spread my earnings across multiple sties and therefore spread the risk of losing a site and a revenue stream

I saw down with my girlfriend and we went through some ideas for niches. Coming up with niches is probably my joint weakest area along with getting links. Luckily she came up with a couple of 40k exact match domains and one 60k exact match domain and a few 12k ones. I registered about five domains and got the first site up later that day. A few of these sites are seasonal and will make most of their sales in the summer months so I am working on getting those up and running first. The others should makes sales all year round so I will get those sites up and running after the summer ones are done. Think I will take some time out this weekend and get them all up and running.

If anyone wants to swap any backlinks get in touch.

Today’s Progress

Went shopping with my girlfriend yesterday and she bought an item of clothing I had not seen before.  This gave me an idea for a niche so I checked the search amount on Google which was 4,400, so far so good, then checked if the domain was available.  The .co.uk was gone but was not being used so I took the .org.uk

Today I installed WordPress which I will be using for this site (#18) and added an Easy Content Unit which I have put in the first post which I will make sticky so it is the first thing users see when they land on the site.  All other posts will be positioned beneath.  The ECU has about 20 items ranging from £5 to £80 from three merchants.

Each post I add will be based around a single product and hopefully it will get indexed within the next few days.

This is an item of clothing that is suited for the summer and this will be the first summer they have been in UK high street stores as far as I can tell.  I’m guessing it will probably be the last too!

Also done a couple of blog posts today but nothing major.  My girlfriend is away for two weeks from Saturday so I will be making up for lost time and getting my existing sites up to scratch whilst she is away.