You are here: Home / Archives for Traffic

Patience with Affiliate Marketing

January 26, 2009 By Jeff 6 Comments
I'm a TigerI 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:

  1. Find a broad niche with Terapeak
  2. Use the Google Adwords Tool to find the “diamonds in the rough” and Terapeak to match what people are looking for and selling
  3. Buy an .info domain for cheap
  4. Outsource a minimum of 5 articles that are related to the niche.
  5. Build a store with a lot of different items that are related to the niche.
  6. Pick one item that has lots of cheap, relevant keywords and popularity on Terapeak, and write a short article with Ebay Ads embeded.
  7. Develop an Adwords campaign to drive traffic
  8. 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.

Filed Under Making Money, Marketing Tagged With , , ,

Time to get Serious

April 18, 2008 By Jeff Leave a Comment

I think that I have reached the point in my life that I think it is time to get serious about becoming self-sufficient. There are aspects in my day job that I like, including the security, however there is not a lot of potential for movement both within the corporate ladder or around the world on work.

A couple of things that I want to do is move around. I want to have the ability to move around on work or move to one place to live for a year and just work there.

I have a few current websites that I am going to become VERY serious about in the coming months. There are exactly 4 including this one. A couple are sites that I have started worked on, let die, then worked on again. I am planning on getting them to the point where they are going strong and making me a steady income. The first target is my forum. I currently have a lot of members that are not active. My plan is to change the front page into a blog targeted on the theme of the forum and build traffic to that. From there I hope to build a readership base that I can then convert to the forum and have community traffic build content for the site.

The next site on my list is the same idea, but it has not been established at all and has very little traffic. It is in a completely different niche and is related to my day-job. My plan here is to build a professional position on the web and work on becoming an EXPERT in particular niches within my profession. From there I hope to be able to gain some consulting work on the side.

Then finially I have this site. I plan on doing more work on this site by the time that summer comes with better articles and status reports on how my experiments are going and give some fancy graphs using Analytics.

I will also be recommending some of the resources that I have used to get my ideas. This is something that is huge, I am going on a trip in a couple of weeks and will be taking a number of books with me that I hope to gain some inspiration from, I will point them your way when I get them

Filed Under Blogging, Me Rambling Tagged With , , , , , , ,