How I Escaped the Rat Race

Sorry it’s taken me so long to give you an update on my progress but I’ve been really busy the last few months. Balancing a full time job, a young family and trying my hardest to get my affiliate career up and running hasn’t been easy, but I’m just about managing it.

In January I had been working on an Adsense site, based on my keyword research from SE Cockpit. This site is only about 4 or 5 pages and although I have had a couple of Adsense clicks, both between £1 and £2, confirming my expectations from my research on CPC, I’ve not been able to get it to rank in Google for my target keywords. I’ve not really been pushing it as hard as I could as the recent Panda update by Google seems to have brought a general opinion in the affiliate world that these types of small niche sites will now be harder to rank.

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a broader niche ‘authority’ site. My keyword research identified 5 or 6 good keywords around my topic and I was able to get .com and .co.uk domains for my main keyword with hyphens (there is some debate over the impact hyphenated domain names may or may not have on Google giving your site credit for an exact match domain name or on people trusting your site). There are also a lot of good keywords for brands with my site name. I am now absolutely convinced that keyword research is perhaps the most important thing to consider when choosing a niche, as this governs the level of traffic you can potentially receive and how much competition you will have to get your site ranked. My previous sites were around subjects I was interested in or where I thought there would be a lot of money to be made, but this is irrelevant if I can’t get people to my site.

I started with the .com and have pulled together a site of around 20 pages. About 5 of these are info around the product with the rest being brand specific pages. I’ve done some backlink building to the site in a variety of ways, including outsourcing some articles posted to social bookmark sites, posting answers to related questions on Yahoo Answers and Quora, and using Social Monkee to create social bookmark links to my site. I have ‘energised’ the Social Monkee links with the backlink energiser tool I thought I’d try out. Not sure how effective it has been.

Results so far are quite positive. I started ranking on google a couple of weeks back and have been getting 20-30 visitors a day. I had a couple of sales at the end of last month (I am just promoting Amazon products on the site) and have had 4 more sales already this month, although 3 of these are totally unrelated to my site (the beauty of Amazon).

Ranking wise, I’m on page 3 on Google.com for my main keyword and on pages 5-9 for my secondary keywords. I’m going to start adding some more detailed product reviews which I hope will improve my rankings and also generate more sales from people who already have those products in mind.

I’m basically just copying the .com site for the .co.uk site and promoting in the UK. I’ve already got a handful of pages up and from less than 10 visitors I’ve already generated a couple of sales with commission on each of just under£5, so that’s also really encouraging.

This month I’m aiming to finish these sites off, keep working on building their rankings, and I’ll probably set up a Facebook page for them as another way to promote the sites.

I’ll also start thinking about another new project to develop, and this will likely be another Amazon niche authority site.

I’ve actually managed to persuade my wife to give affiliate marketing a go too, and she has a domain and hosting all ready to go. The big challenge is finding the time to teach her how to use WordPress and get the site up and running.

Hope things are going well for you all in your own bids to escape the rat race and I’ll try to give another progress update next month, along with some more info on the tools I’ve been using.

I started out in affiliate marketing at the end of 2010 and, although I’ve worked hard at it, it’s not quite worked out for me yet. I now have half a dozen sites, 3 of which are pretty small, but the others are reasonably big sites that I’ve put a lot of work into. Only 2 of these sites make any money, and nowhere near the amounts I would like. 

In the later part of last year I found the time I could devote to affiliate marketing diminish significantly – I started a new job and my second child came along. I’ve remained committed to make a success of it and so at the end of 2011 I had a good think about where I have been going wrong. These are my conclusions:

- although I’ve concentrated on good content, which has worked in getting me some traffic, I’ve not really planned articles/posts to make sure I’m actually using relevant keywords as I should be;
- the research I’ve done on keywords has been minimal or ineffective, do I’m not sure there is traffic, or low competition, to make targeting them worthwhile;
- I’ve not concentrated enough on off-site promotion, despite trying a few things out, with no real strategy to promote my sites and get them ranking well in the search engines.

So, having hopefully identified at least some of where I’m going wrong, what am I doing to put it right?  By the way, I realise I’m not completely starting from scratch, but I like the song and it seems to fit!

Well, thanks to Joe at How I Got Rich, I’ve taken a look at Trent’s Online Income Lab, which has a whole host of information on affiliate marketing, especially around niche sites and particularly Adsense sites. I’ve picked up some great tips and have set out the following strategy to build some new Amazon niche sites and Adsense sites. I’m going to keep the sites small at first then see what does well for me and go from there. Trent suggests outsourcing pretty much everything, but I’m going to do most things myself at first before throwing too much money at it.

My aim is to get a couple of sites up a month – with each site being around 5 pages. My aim is to build sites that will earn at least £50 on average, though hopefully I can develop the better ones to earn much more. My basic strategy is set out below:
- identify strong keywords using SECockpit
- get a decent related domain if available
- build small WordPress sites with at least 5 pages of relevant content targeting my keywords
- set up site for adsense or affiliate links as appropriate.
- social bookmark sites with targeted articles
- link building, mainly to articles linking to my site
- watch as the money rolls in (I hope)

I think this gives me at least a better chance of developing some sites that will earn for me. Would be great to hear from anyone who has tried a similar strategy to get your ideas/views. I’ll keep you updated as to how I get on.

Ever since I set out in affiliate marketing, one of the biggest challenges for me has been to understand how to use SEO effectively. A couple of my sites rank well for long tail keywords, which is great, and even rank reasonably for the more competitive keywords in their niches. I’ve done some link-building, but never worked out how much difference that has made. I’ve also used a social bookmarking service a couple of times and then used the Drip Feed Blast service to link to them, which seemed to work quite well, but at a cost.

More recently, a new site started to get decent traffic for a couple of good keywords (around 100 visitors a day) without any real effort at all on my part, but that traffic has mysteriously dried up almost completely in the last few weeks, with me none the wiser as to why I got the traffic in the first place, nor where it then disappeared to!

I’ve also tried to promote my sites using Twitter and Facebook (although only to followers and friends, not paid adevertising) to try and get some help from the links, but also to try to generate some interest, but I’ve not noticed any real success from doing this.

For my latest venture I’ve decided to take SEO out of the equation.  This project is basically a version of a cashback site, where potential customers will be incentivised to use the site rather than finding me through searches.  The clear advantage of this is that I should see faster results and my campaign is much less at the mercy of the search engines.  There are other considerations I do need to make, but I feel that this will be a positive move for me.  Having said that, I do believe that my long term future in affiliate marketing will involve SEO, rather than offline marketing methods, but hopefully this project will provide some much needed funds to plough back into getting some decent domains to work with.

We’ll see how it goes and hopefully I’ll have some good news to report back with soon.

Affiliates promoting US online poker were in for a very nasty shock on 15 April, now known as Black Friday in the poker world.  The US Federal Government indicted online poker giants PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute poker with charges of breaching the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act and the operation of an illegal gambling business.  Many affiliates will have seen their income stream from poker dry up over night, and for a large proportion of these, it will represent a major part of their total income and could put them out of business.

So, what’s the lesson for other affiliates?  Well, as for any business, it definitely pays to not put all your eggs in one basket.  Having all your income coming from one source, or one specific area, is a huge risk to your business.  Changes in market conditions, or to legislation in the area in which you operate can take your healthy business and just kill it overnight?  For part-time affiliates like me, this isn’t too much of a disaster, but if you’re using affiliate marketing as your major or only source of income, it’s vital you think about this risk.

Many affiliates will have one site that is their major bread-winner, but it definitely pays to spread your earnings across several sites.  For example, if you have 10 sites each bringing in an annual income of £1,000, if you lose one site, it’s much easier to manage than if you lose your only site that brings in £10,000 a year.   You also need to think about whether something like this could affect more than one of your sites, if they pormote similar products or services that would be affected in the same way by an event such as this.

This isn’t something that really affects me at the moment, as none of my sites are really earning anything much, but I am trying to build a portfolio of sites across different sectors so that if/when I do start making some money from my affiliate sites, I’ll be in a much less risky position.  Although my poker site – see previous post - does promote the sites in question, I’m not restricted to US customers so hopefully I won’t be affected too much when the site does start making money.  There is also an opportunity presented from Black Friday, in that some sites are still allowing US poker players, so many players will be looking for a new place to play poker.  Hope I can get some of them signed up through my site!

Do use Black Friday to act as a reminder of what can happen and don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.

One of the things that has puzzled me most about affiliate marketing since I started is how to generate useful backlinks, and I know this is something other newbie affiliates also struggle with.  There is lots of advice out there, but as there are so many ways to get backlinks and different strategies used by diffferent people, I’ve found it a bit of a minefield.

I’ve also found that there is an apparently infinite number of people out there willing to generate backlinks for you for a fee – some people swear by this outsourcing, while others tell you to avoid it like the plague.  My mind isn’t yet made up on that, but I have recently come across Social Monkee, which seems to fit somewhere in between outsourcing and doing it all yourself. 

With Social Monkee, you can submit one url each day, with a description and tags, and this will be submitted, free of charge, to 25 social bookmark sites.  You can upgrade to a premium account to increase this to 100 links per day, either by paying a fee, or by referring 12 new members to them.

I’ve only just started using the service, so no results to report yet, and like most backlinks, it will be difficult to apportion any success to any particular action, but it seems like a good idea, doesn’t take long, and can’t do any harm, so hopefully I’ll have some positive results to report soon.

To try it out yourself – click on the banner below: