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I have been dabbling in Affiliate Marketing for about 6 months now, however it has really been sporatic until recently. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to increase my personal income dramatically by mid-year. I believed that the best way to do this with long term thoughts was to increase my exposure with affiliate marketing.
So starting January 1, I made my self more involved with the Ebay Partner Network and started researching niches that I have some knowledge in on Tearpeak. With this information in hand I started building Wordpress blogs with a few articles and a lot of Ebay ads using PHP-Pro. I decided to use PHPBay-Pro versus BANS (Build a Niche Store) because of all of the headaches that a few friends of mine were having getting delisted from Google faster and faster.
Here are the steps that I have been taking to get my sites online and making money:
- Find a broad niche with Terapeak
- Use the Google Adwords Tool to find the “diamonds in the rough” and Terapeak to match what people are looking for and selling
- Buy an .info domain for cheap
- Outsource a minimum of 5 articles that are related to the niche.
- Build a store with a lot of different items that are related to the niche.
- Pick one item that has lots of cheap, relevant keywords and popularity on Terapeak, and write a short article with Ebay Ads embeded.
- Develop an Adwords campaign to drive traffic
- Profit!
That was the plan going in, and that is still the plan in broad strokes, however I am having HUGE problems with that last step. I am not making any profit at the moment, currently my ROI is very poor, negative poor. My mutual funds are doing better. Now I am not losing a lot of money since I am only spending very little and still am testing the waters, but that doesn’t make it feel any better. I expected by now to be at least coming close to breaking even.
How am I going to fix it?
Right now I am taking a step back to analyze where I am at. I am not sure what I have to change, or what I have to tweak to bring in the people that want to buy what I am selling, but I have to figure it out before the end of February. That is the date that I have given myself to show a profit or jump ship. I do have patience, and I know that I am late getting into the game, but I need to be making money and not losing it to reach my goals. I could be freelancing my various skills, but I feel that I am better served finding revenue streams that will have longer term gains when I stop putting the same level of effort into them.
I will update everyone at the beginning of Feb with a spreadsheet of my endeavours.
I have some goals for 2009 that I am going to reach.
500 Posts
The first one is to achieve 500 posts on this blog. Bluenoser.net has been online for years, but I have only around 300 posts and some of those are useless ones that I put up at the beginning just to have content.
MORE PROFIT
In 2009 I have a goal to quadruple my online profits. This is not an overly ambitious goal, and I think that by the end of January I will be making it a TEN fold increase. Tim of 4HWW and some of has followers have said that making high goals actually increases your likely hood for success.
More Time
I am in 2009 going to increase my productivity to the point that I can spend more time doing what I want to be doing. That includes travelling and reading. This is the first year that I have read less than 10 GOOD books in a year. I miss reading and increasing my knowledge.
Professional Equity
Along with my various online endeavours I am going to start working on building “professional equity”. I am not sure if this term has been coined before, if not here is my definition. Anything that increases your worth to your profession and company which in turn increases the demand in your services. I have started doing this by achieving my LEED AP designation, and in the first of the year I will be gaining my P.Eng (once I finish my diaries). There are two more on my list one is to get my FE in April and follow with my PE in Maryland, or another state in the US.
The other BIG thing is staying tight to my chest, but hear is a hint, it is going to be a teaching program for a tight niche in my industry that I have expertise in, and believe that there is a lack of information available to fellow engineers and industry in general. I hope for this to be my muse(read 4HWW if you don’t know what this is)
I am working on my first site that will be purely made for affiliate marketing. This is a site that I have built after taking everything that I learned from The Black Ink Project. I am about 6 months behind schedule, but I have the site completely online, with a lot of content in the blog and most of my first campaign on the go.
I have just got my first pass on the campaign online. I have a lot of tweaking to do after I get my first round of keyword information. I picked the time that I did to put it online so that I can play with the volume of traffic over the holidays and get some good keyword information. I am not planning on making much in the lines of cash on this first batch, but with some major tweaking I think that the site will be a winner for me in the New Year. I have spent approximately $700 on the site design and content to this point, and believe that all that I have left is the marketing and a small volume of blog posts.
Some of the things that I have learned so far are:
Outsourcing is not the be all end all
As readers of this blog will no I have had some issues with outsourcing. Some of these issues are my fault and not defining what I was expecting in the communications. Other times are the freelancers not delivering on schedule.
I actually had one writer tell me that they were not going to be meeting the schedule. I asked for a discount and they said that I was already getting a deal and to take it or leave it. I left it. If you decide to take the contract, and yes it is a contract, then you have a responsibility to follow it.
With writers you get what you pay for, and typically less
I am not a great writer and it shows a lot of the time. But I am working on it. SO when I was looking to get content for my affiliate site I decided to outsource as much as I could. I can tell you this now, you really get what you pay for at best. I have gone through a few writers on this site alone and I am not completely satisfied with any of them. There are a few that I have blogging now that I think are the best, but I am still doing some editing to make them blog posts. This is something that I think will improve.
However like I said above, there are some out there that feel like they are doing you a favour for giving you such a “deal” and expect you to just take what they give you. If you come across such a writer, dump them. You are hiring them because either you don’t have the skill or time, and as such shouldn’t have to deal with their BS
Choose Your Niche Well
This is another thing that people tell you to do all of the time, but I never really understood what they meant until now. The niche that I am developing my affiliate site in seems to be very narrow as it is. But when I am choosing the content for the site I realize that there is a broad range of customers that will be visiting your site. So just because the service, type of service or product is very narrow. The customer that will be visiting your site is broad.
You might be selling blue widgets, and that would be a very narrow product niche. However what type of customer are you targeting? The person that is doing their initial research on blue widgets? Finding out there is out there for blue widgets? Or are you looking for the people that have decided on the type of widget they want and you just have to give it to them. That is really where you want to be.
Then you have the demographic that you have to appeal to. This could be a lifestyle demographic, geographic, or age and gender demographic. There is a reason that all “woman” magazines look a certain way, and men’s mags look the way they do, they are targeting a particular demographic.
So why bother?
If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing then get out there. The Black Ink Project is a great resource for the beginner. They are not really telling you anything that you can’t find online for free, and the only reason that I actually signed up was that it was free.
That said, there is something to be said for having all of the information that you need to get started in one place and one resource.
Oh yeah, and if anyone tells you that affiliate marketing is easy, they lucked out and will probably be doing something else next year. There is a lot of work involved in marketing any product, but the beauty is that you can do it in your home office, or on the beach in some tropical paradise (if they have Wi-Fi). This is the reason that I am doing this, and spending so much time writing, researching, and producing. I want to be completely self-sufficient and with a nice nest egg in the next 2 years. I have a multi-pronged approach to this that I will use to succeed and be diverse.
I am a huge reader and one of the things that I use my Online Profits for is cleaning out my Amazon Wish List. Now I have a number of new books that I am going to have to add to the list. ChrisG has written a post on ProBlogger called “5 Influential Books All Bloggers Should Know“.
This is a relatively old post, but I was going through my starred feeds and noticed it again.
There are a number of them that I have not heard of before, but there are a few books that I would definitely add to the list would be:
I understand why he didn’t (Chris authored the book with Darren) but it is an amazing book for the beginner blogger, and a great resource for the blogger who has been around. The chapters on “Blog Writing” and “Blog Promotion” were very useful to me.
Seth Godin writes great books on marketing, and the Dip is great. It is all about teaching when to quit and when you persevere. I hear a lot of people saying that you should get the audio, but come on it is not that long. I find that if you read it once, you will understand it better than listening to it 3 or 4 times.
And finally The Four Hour Work Week
This book by Tim Ferris is great, and like Chris mentions when talking about E-Myth is great for teaching what you can do to give yourself more time by having others do your tasks. Like many I was fooled by the title, there is a lot of work to do before you can create a reasonable income only working 4 hours a week, but the book tells you how and makes you excited to get out there and try.
Is there any books that Chris or I missed that you think should be on the short list of every blogger or small business owners wish list?
I am in the process of writing some great posts, if I do say so myself, on how to start your online presence. One of the things that I have written about on the blogging is working on making your blog sticky. This is something that I realized was lacking on my own site.
So I took some time on the weekend to see if I could remedy that. The first thing that I did was add the WWSGD plugin. This is a plugin inspired by the almighty Seth Godin, I am a huge fan. It basically puts some text at the start of a post depending if the user is new or not. If they are new you try to get them to read some of your better work and of course add you RSS feed.
The second thing that I did was add a Related Posts plugin so that every post I write will have more for people to follow and hopefully get my pesky bounce rate down some. There are a number of them out there, but I chose this one. It seems to do what I want but I may be trying out some other ones in the future.
Thirdly I added the add signature plugin this plugin adds something to the end of every post. Currently I am just begging the reader to add my feed to their reader. I will have to think of something better soon, maybe some advertising.
And lastly I added a bunch of buttons on my sidebar so that people will know how to add my site to the various readers that are out there. With this there is no thought; just feeding.
I did this simply with the Feedburner publize tool. It took a little while, I wish they would simply write a plugin that you can select all that you want and make one cop-paster.
I am hoping to have the start of the posts that I mentioned above by the end of the week. The thing that inspired me to write them is people asking how to start a site, or others asking how I make money with my websites. I am hoping that this series will enable me to simply point them to this site and all of their answers will be answered.
