How I Got Rich

Back to Work

Well I’ve just had a week off work and am now back in the grind doing the 9-5. I had a great week off, probably didn’t do as much affiliate marketing as I should but it was nice to be a man of leisure and my own boss for a while. I did suffer from my old problem of not doing as much as I should and doing other things that are fun but won’t earn me money like going to the gym, lying by the pool, learning Thai and doing Thai boxing. These were my goals for the week:

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the last 7 days:
1. Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
2. Get all my sites up to date
3. Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
4. Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

So how did I get on? Not as well as I hoped but what’s the point in having goals if they are too easy to achieve?!

Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)

I was going to look at Aweber for my affiliate marketing mailing list but someone suggested mailchimp.com as it is free for the first 1,000 users so it would be an inexpensive way to test out a mailing list. I signed up with them and added a signup form to my busiest site which gets a good few hundred hits a day. My signup form is in the sidebar of the (WordPress) site and not in a popup but it is above the fold so everyone who lands on the site should see it. After having it on the site for about half a week and being seen by maybe 1000 users no one has signed up! The form does look a bit cruddy as I am yet to smarten it up but I am bit disappointed no one has signed up. I will try and jazz it up a bit and see if that helps and then maybe try putting it in a popup, although I don’t want to scare off any customers.

Get all my sites up to date

I didn’t even get close to this. I spent most of the time working on just one of my sites and adding content to it and smartening it up. The site is on page 4 for its main keyword but gets a fair amount of long tail traffic and makes a few sales so my goal is to get it up to page 1 in Google and see if it becomes more profitable. I’ve added some content but no backlinks so not sure if this will help.

Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites

I read a few blog posts on this but still no closer to outsourcing getting my pages formatted with links, ECU and content. Once I do this I think I will move a few steps up the ladder in terms of earnings as I can get lots of content added to my sites very quickly which is one of my main sticking points at the moment – not having enough time.

Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

No progress on this. Think I will scrap it as too much work to do and probably not much demand for it! Maybe after 5 years.

Going On Holiday

Well I am off on my summer holidays next weekend so am frantically trying to tie up as many lose ends as possible regarding my affiliate marketing websites.  I did think about taking the netbook with me but with a 12″ screen it is too big plus where I am going I’m not sure if it would survive the journey.  I did look into getting a cheaper, smaller one but there doesn’t seem to be any £100 or so mini netbooks on the market.

Instead I will try and find some internet cafes and try and do the odd hour here and there although I don’t know how realistic that will be when I have the option of being on the beach or by the pool.

So before I go I will load up the USB stick with all my site info and try to find a FTP programme I can run off the thumb drive so I can easily upload any files.  As I use WordPress now for nearly all my sites updating them shouldn’t be too hard providing I have internet access.

Have a good summer!

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…

What I’m Doing at the Moment

Here is a quick update of what I am doing at the moment in the world of affiliate marketing:

• Getting my existing sites to number one in Google. I’m doing this by moving them to WordPress and writing or buying new content for them.  Once they are all well ranked in Google I can see which ones are worth focusing on.
• Trying PPC for Financial Leads. I’m in the process of getting a site designed which I can use for collecting financial leads which I will get traffic via AdWords.  I’m going to be doing this via the Affiliate Marketing School.
• Working on my big site. This is still not ranking but will keep adding content to hopefully get it listed for some good keywords.
• Have a look at some more micro niche sites. My old ones are still bringing in the odd £15 sale once or twice a month so they are not to be dismissed.  Obviously some of them never made a sale.  Maybe I will sit down and do 10 or so on the weekend and see how they get on.

I think that is it for me.  I also want to have a closer look at feeds and automating things a bit more but will wait for a while.

Short term goal is still to be making £1000 by September 2010 and long term goal is to be making £2000 per month by September £2000.

What I done did today

After work and between the gym and my Thai class I wrote a few more bits of content about an older site which is finally climbing the Google tree and is at number three.  These were two 250ish word product reviews that I have done as separate Wordpress posts.

I’ve also decided to split apart my big site I am working on into two smaller big sites as the two areas are not that closely related.  After deciding this I spend some time looking for a UK based host I could host the site with as I want to move away from having all my sites on one server based in a different country to the one I am targeting.

After I’ve picked the host I will look for a WordPress theme that meets my needs and get cracking on the site.  I want it ranking well for at least one product before Easter so I’ve not got long to get something up.  Hopefully I will have a quiet weekend and get some work done.

One of my newish sites made its first sale netting £10 commission which was nice.  A few more of those this month will make me happy.

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?

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.

Things to Do

Things to do for week ending Sunday March 29 2009:

• Install WordPress and make a few posts on sites 13 & 14
• Add a couple of products to site 15
• Add a couple of products to site 5
• Add individual product pages to site 16 using WordPress or maybe static HTML pages
• Install Drupal or Joomla somewhere and see what its like