How I Got Rich

Moving Old Sites Over to Wordpress

I didn’t much like Wordpress when I first started out in this game of affiliate marketing.  I thought it was too restrictive on what you could post, the themes weren’t that great and it seemed like a bit of an overkill for a small niche landing page.  As my dreams of being a web design were never realised building affiliate marketing sites using HTML and CSS gave me an opportunity to indulge my creative tendencies.  Due to all this I decided Wordpress wasn’t for me and I would build my own sites.

But as time went on I kept reading about how Google loved blogs and Wordpress blogs in-particular and how well they ranked and were easy to update and customise.  After a while I decided to try Wordpress on a few sites.  Besides, my web hosts, Hostgator, gave me access to cPanel and Fantastico which made installing Wordpress a breeze.  I installed Wordpress, picked a free theme that looked nice and started building my site.  It took me a while to work out the best way to setup the site including how to use the tags and categories in the best way, how to organise the posts and pages and which plug-ins to use.  But once my sites had been up and running for a while I noticed they started to rank quite well.  Once I had seen this for myself I started putting more effort into understanding Wordpress and soon after I started work on my own theme.  I found a blank theme that I could modify and shortly after I had my first Wordpress theme which I would use for my keyword domain niche sites.  I also created a version that is suited to atomic or micro niche sites.

This has all worked out rather well for me and I can now have a site up and running in less than a day with a few posts of content and all the relevant admin pages (contact, privacy, discliamer, etc).  I am now in the process of migrating my existing older sites into Wordpress sites.  So far this has gone well as previously where I had 10 or so product reviews on an HTML page I have now put each product review into a separate Wordpress post.  As Google sees each of these post as a seperate page my sites have all grown a lot bigger in page count even though the same content is being used.

The move has been positive for each site I have moved over so far and they have either held their top position in Google or moved up in the SERPS.

From now on I am a Wordpress only affiliate marketer.  Although I’ve yet to look at Drupal or Joomla.  Am I missing out on anything?

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.

Another Site Ranked #1 in Google

Yesterday I saw one of my first sties (#6) which is also my most successful site had made its way to number one in Google for its main keyword search term.

It had been number two behind amazon for a few weeks but has now overtaken it.  In the first 14 days of this month this site has made at least one sale every day apart from for three days with the total number of sales being 27 in the first 14 days of this month.  Each sales brings in between £1 – £4.

The search term of this niche got 22,200 exact local matches in May.  So if being at number one in Google gets me 40% of that and 1% then convert it should look something like this: 8,800 hit per month.

40% of 22,200 = 8,880 hits per month (296 per day).

1% of 8,880 = 88.8 sales per month.

88.8 x £2.50 = £222 commission per month.

Those figures all look very high considering I get about 30 hits at most per day at the moment.

It would be amazing if one site could bring in £222.  If you had four performing like that you’d be on almost £1000 a month.  Also the items on this site probably won’t be as popular in the winter months.

Ranked Number One in Google

One of my first sties (#5) that I set-up back in February when I was first getting into affiliate marketing has today been ranked number one in Google for its main keyword.

This search term got 12,100 local exact matches for May according to the Google Keyword Tool so it should start getting a few more hits.  Previously it was hovering around the bottom of page one.

Although it is at the top of the Google search engine results page (SERP)  there are three shopping links above it and three paid Adwords ads above it which is a bit of a shame!

Also this site doesn’t have many products on it as there are hardly any merchants with affiliate programmes in this niche.  There are lots of other sites selling items in this niche on page one of Google but unfortunately they do not have affiliate programmes.

The site was made using Wordpress which I have also used for some of my other sites.  Part of me loves Wordpress due to the ease and speed new sites can be launched but another part of me hates it for it inflexibility.  I also love how quickly pages get indexed from Wordpress sites.  When I get a free day I will sit down and make my own theme that I am happy with and then I will use Wordpress more and more.

How often does Google update its listings?

A fair amount of my sites were on page one in Google for their keywords.

One was as high as number three on page one so was getting around 10 hits a day.  The other sites were mainly found on the bottom half of page one so were getting a few hits a day. Some were making the odd sale but most were making none.   They were all for 5,000 to 10,000 monthly searched keyword niches.

I check my sites each day to see where they are ranking and there hadn’t been much movement until I checked a few days ago to find most of them had all gone down the Google search enging results page (serps) on the same day.

This lead me to wonder how often does Google update its index?  I thought it was a constant process but as a lot of my pages all jumped on the same day it leads me to think otherwise.

It doesn’t really matter but it can’t help to know as much as you can about Google considering most search engine traffic comes via the big G.

Now I have the task of frantically updating my sites in the hope they will return to page one.  If they don’t make it back some will have to be cut lose to allow me to focus on the small number of my sites that are making sales.