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Hi everyone,

Title says it all. I've been using good product photos as the featured image for product reviews, but can't find anything relevant for general how-tos and guides. There are little to no stock images relevant to the products I review since they're a bit unusual. Having an irreleveant photo, or a lack of one, appears sloppy and untrustworthy.

Anyone have any quick tips/tricks they use to make good featured images? I'm currently making some using photoshop, but it's a bit amateur looking and would turn me off if I was just a random reader.

I don't want to dump a lot of time into this since it's ultimately not that important (unless it is, then correct me).

Thanks for the help in advance.

I'm thinking about this idea of a startup and I need you to analyse it.

I'm thinking about launching a website that sells traditional jewelry (mainly silver and coral) online. I'll be working with small artisans who would have more exposition to sell their creations over my website.

The main source of revenue will be commission on sales, and may be ads.

This website should have a certain "luxury" image. I didn't contact any artisan for the moment. I need to mesure the demand on the market, is there any free tool to use to conceive a good market survey online ?

Please criticize my idea. Thank you.

Oh right, I forgot how you lot needed everything spoon-fed.

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This is affiliate MARKETING. Not build a site and wait. I personally will be happy if Amazon drops its commissions. That barrier to entry just got a lot higher for those that cannot market. As I Always say, it is currently the EASIEST it has ever been to build a site, rank it and earn. So easy it's stupid. The bar could do with some raising.

This is a good point and the silver-lining. I was able to use Amazon to learn how to do this, and now I can branch out.

I don't fully agree with what you're saying about Amazon and their profitability. I think we agree on this premise, but I see it coming sooner rather than later.

Amazon will continue to reinvest the money they make and thus not look as "profitable" when it comes to the bottom line, but they're going to start shifting their money around.

They don't need to pay affiliates as much to get new customers anymore. Instead, everyone knows about them and knows the benefits of a Prime membership. 45% of US households are Prime members, they know that number can go up but it's not going to be because of more affiliate sites.

So they'll pay affiliates less and put that money towards warehouses, faster delivery, digital content, and lower prices which is what they need to grow Prime membership.

At best, they'll lower affiliate commissions across the board with the exception of some categories they don't dominate. They might even raise those. Merch is clearly them trying to establish a presence in Fashion (as well as many of their other efforts) so IMO that's the safest niche to be in right now.

This news is over 3 months old...

For a spray and pray approach with existing social traffic then an amazon affiliate site set out like thisiswhyimbroke.com can prove effective as minimal content is needed and the site can be set up easily in under a day.

This is very nice, thank you. Now I have to find a theme like that.

The same things that are going to make people buy from an affiliate site are the same things that'll make you rank decently on Google.

If you provide very little content and have a crappy looking site, people aren't going to buy. They'll be too sketched out to buy from your site.

You think you can drive 10,000 hits a day with social and may be able to initially but people aren't going to keep clicking your links unless it's driving them somewhere of value, they aren't going to keep clicking. You can drive plenty of traffic with paid social too but they won't bother buying if your site isn't quality again and even if it is, generally the affiliate revenue isn't enough to offset the cost of going paid.

It's nothing to drive 10k clicks. Clicks are worthless if only a couple buy. It's much different to create an engaged following where you drive those clicks and a large number of them buy. Because of this stick to posting that kinda stuff on social only when I know it's something very relevant to my followers interests and when it's driving to a quality piece that is right for conversion.

I'm open to anything. I prefer not making a review site as I don't want to write reviews or pay people to do so. What is the best format then?

Also, I am able to drive a lot of traffic through social media(10000 hits daily), if that makes a difference. I'm not expecting return visitors, my website is just a middleman.

Thanks for the links, those sites look good. I don't have the money/time to create something like that now, but it's good to get an idea of what is out there.

I'd be happy to hear any nuances specific to amazon as well. I am new to SEO, but I am pretty experienced with driving traffic with social media.

Do you have any recommendations for decent book affiliate programs? Almost all of our sales were from books (recommended reading when a topic shows up), but we've had a hard time getting people to buy anything that isn't from Amazon because the pricing isn't competitive enough.

I'd be interested in that case study. What would the two hours work be? Content writing?

Just to clarify - 4k a year?

That is not entirely correct If you link to "add to cart" directly Amazon will remember that for 90 days

Great, interested in reading about your case study.

For some reason, my brain connected the 4k with your year plan and assumed it was 4k a year, which works out to roughly ~7.50/hr pre taxes. I guess it would beat working at Burger King but not by much.

Serious question here; I'm not trolling.

How does everyone deal with the possibility that Amazon could pull their plug at any moment?

I had an affiliate store on a community web site, but Amazon claimed that we violated our ToS by hotlinking to our wishlist for people that wanted to donate business-related merchandise directly to us. The link was directly to Amazon, and none of them were affiliate links.

Anyhow, Amazon reviewed the site one day when I sent a help email because of a glitch in their system, then shut us down. Because of the supposed violation they pulled the plug immediately, then contacted us. We removed the link to our bookmarks, but they said that our site could not be reactivated -- we'd have to re-apply and start over, and any earnings that hadn't been paid out yet were lost.

It didn't sit well with me, so I ditched the store entirely. Then we moved everything else away from Amazon S3.

So, serious question... How do you deal with the threat of Amazon pulling your plug at any given moment without warning?

I assume some kind of review site is the best for this as it's an easy way to have some kind of content. My site will have most of its traffic from social media, I don't really care about google. At least that is the plan for now.

I'd like to see an example of a decent amazon affiliate site.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this site that is currently for sale on Flippa here.

Since lots of us have been following Humble's case study I think it would be cool to have a discussion around what they did well, and what would make it better, especially because all the traffic and financials are available.

Looks like current revenue is around $1200/month with around 12,000 unique visitors per month. From my experience, this falls well in line with a site with decent to good optimization.

What pages are good and what are bad? How would you change the layout of the content pages? How would you go about increasing revenue without creating new content?

Just wondering what people's thoughts are on API only content management systems. These types of systems are software-as-a-service and are a part of the emerging content-as-a-service market. How they work is they behave like any standard CMS in that content authors can login and create content and upload assets. The point of difference from other CMS' like Wordpress is that they do not serve 'pages' rather admins can create custom content types with custom fields with content retrieved from a RESTful interface (JSON). As a developer / startup / entrepreneur would you consider using a system like this? Why / Why not?

EDIT: I've since started http://contentjet.io

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For what it's worth I thought I'd share some data and observations around the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holidays.

Here is an image of traffic/earnings from two different websites between 2015 and 2016:

http://imgur.com/a/uPwiu

List of observations and thoughts:

1) Black Friday hasn't historically been overwhelming for me. I didn't do any specific Black Friday promotion other than adding some Black Friday banners in prominent Ad locations but the conversions were nearly useless on these.

2) Cyber Monday outperforms Black Friday in pretty much all areas. Traffic and conversions both up substantially vs Black Friday.

3) The number of items "shipped" vs the items "ordered" is pretty drastic. I don't know if the vendors have a hard time keeping up with moving inventory or what but it seems that the discrepancy is almost always 1.5 - 2 fold which I think generally correlates with earnings in the days post cyber monday.

4) The two traffic/earning screen captures are from two completely different websites. My new website reduces the number of options and focuses on more carefully selected products. It's not enough to just generate clicks, putting better/more highly targeted offers (products) is definitely worthwhile. My old website generated a higher percentage of clicks per user but way underperformed in comparison to the new one.

5) I'm really kicking myself in teeth by not utilizing e-mail lists. I'm leaving so much money on the table but not capturing e-mails. I've attempted it a couple times but mostly ended up getting lazy with my implementation and abandoned the effort.

If I spent some time integrating and optimizing some opt-ins, with a 2% conversion rate I could get 120 opt-ins per day, and if I just did it today a year from now I could have a highly targeted list of ~ 44,000 users to market to directly. I really need to fix this ASAP.

A lot of lessons learned with this site iteration vs my previous ones. It's always a good idea to always be A/B testing your money pages which I still don't do enough of. I was always worried that if I changed my pages at all that it would tank my SERPs and I was always afraid to make changes but my observations are that this isn't usually the case as long as the bulk of the content remains consistent.

I'm starting two new websites next month after a month of brainstorming and research. One in the shoe niche that is completely off Amazon utilizing the affiliate programs of the major shoe retailers and another one that is going to combine Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, Best Buy, and Overstock, and testing shorter form content and curated lists over straight buyers guides/reviews, I'm sure I'll post some nuggets and lessons from those projects as we get into 2017.

Anyone care to share any tidbits from their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales and any special promotional tricks? I could use some more aces up my sleeve to better capitalize around holidays.

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Saying that you want to be a millionaire is not a goal.

A goal is something that you actually do and accomplish, a byproduct of which can be a million or a billion.

You talk about mediocrity/whatever but you got a degree in "Media Art" and at 22, that seems to be your only accomplishment...

No offense, but it's time to actually start doing instead of daydreaming. And by doing, I don't mean writing blog posts and reading get rich books and meeting "inspirational" gurus. I mean actually doing something that has potential to make money.

Unless I'm mistaken, I believe /u/Humblesalesman host with them as well.

These are good points - it would be cool to create something amazing and go down in history as one of those truly epic entrepreneurs. Definitely something to think about.

What I feel like I've been chasing is the advice of John Goodman in the Gamber. One of my favorite movie scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI

Other than social media profiles, I might spend a month doing the type of outreach stuff that /u/Humblesalesman did this past month in his study. After the first 10-20 links though it will be very rare to find me spending a month doing that sort of work. You'll get organic links over time and I've never had a problem ranking without them. I'd probably rank even better if I did spend more time but I find that for the sheer volume of time it takes, I'm better off adding content.

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Never being truly happy with something you started seems to be the differentiating factor between those that make it, and those that do not.

I just want to point out that the studies that showed having multiple monitors increases productivity were funded by companies that make monitors. A bigger screen is better tho. Also hope you can clarify are you recommending the visual tab or not, could be worded better. A lot of this makes a lot of sense thanks.

Here's to hoping - although I don't see myself being dramatically happier at that stage other than being able to pay cash for a vacation property, making investments, and buying toys I probably don't need heh. It will be nice to cross seven figures off the bucket list I suppose.

I thought I'd offer the sub a few handy and uncommon-ish tips from my experience doing affiliate marketing for awhile.

Learn HTML if for some reason you haven't.

HTML is really, an insanely easy language to learn. You should be able to view a competitors page source and understand most of what you see. You don't have to be a master, but if you can at least understand the following tags, you'll be decently ahead of the game. href, img, table, body, span, br, strong, em, body, head

Master Wordpress

Wordpress is freaking amazing. There is a bit of a learning curve, but you should be pretty adept with it after your first few sites. If you can edit the theme php files to customize the functionality of a prebuilt theme you'll have a great understanding of how things work.

Understand PHP

Once you have a decent HTML foundation, PHP makes sense. I can't code raw functionality, but if you can google a problem and make a PHP change to bolster or remove bloated functionality from your theme, you're in a good spot.

Learn CSS (at least how to manipulate it)

I also can't code CSS from scratch for shit, but I can edit the wordpress CSS files to create new classes that I want to use and change the padding and sizes of things. This is really useful for minimizing white space in your header, making sure things are well above the fold, and that your text is nice and readable. Being able to change the padding and size of your headers, h1, h2, ect is really nice.

Stop using the visual tab

In Wordpress, make your content in the text tab. It's a royal pain in the ass because Wordpress by default will corrupt anything you do in the text tab, so I never, ever, switch back to the visual tab. I just preview the page and make changes accordingly.

Get comfy with excel

Excel is a damn godsend. Get the add-on called "ASAP Utilities". I make all of my wordpress posts from excel. I hard code templates for a small handful of high converting post types, where all I have to do is literally paste my affiliate link once and it will automagically make the affiliate links 7-10 times throughout the post, nofollowed, with analytics tracking code embedded in it. With ASAP utilities, I use the "change all characters to lowercase" and the advanced character remove and replace feature to make dozens of product names URL friendly to make image file names SEO friendly. The simplest and easiest function you should learn is the combine cells function. I just take snippets of code and use combine statements to automatically plugin image file names, affiliate links, tables, ect.

Stop wasting time with manual functions wherever possible

If your making tables, comparison tables, or CSS buttons, embedding images, stop wasting time with prebuilt content creators like Thrive Content Builder, or Tablepress. Create them once, and use the HTML/CSS Classes for the objects and put them into your excel template to be replicate the format across dozens of pages and make them unique instead of like every other affiliate site out there.

Get dual monitors

If you're still working off a single monitor I don't know how you work. I have my browser with wordpress in one window then excel, photoshop, and another browser all on the other screen so I don't have to constantly minimize and move tabs around.

If SEO is your traffic source, more content equals more money

You can beat your head against the wall all day trying to perfectly optimize one piece of content, scraping keyword density from all your competitors, trying to get their backlinks, ect. I've never really chased backlinks, just focused on skyscraping content and it's worked infinitely better than trying to build a 50 site PBN just to make a 10 page site rank.

Get comfortable editing images

You don't need photoshop, paint works just fine for pretty much everything. I do use photoshop, but only because it's so much easier to use image templates and layers to produce the volume of images I need.

Don't waste money

You could spend a bunch of money on rank tracking, and more plugins, and themes, and guides, and everything else. It's extremely rare that I spend money in this department, because none of it is ROI generating activity. Reverse engineering a successful website for yourself will give you 10 times the value most guides or blogs will teach you.

That's it for now. Good luck out there.

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I don't understand what your second sentence means.

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Hey redditors - Im not selling anything, just offering solid content that you may find yourself to enjoy. I wrote a great article discussing 30 proven backlink building strategies that I have been using this year, successfully. Let me know if you have any questions, enjoy!

https://www.linkalmighty.com/link-building-strategies/

I know you enjoy the traffic from the 117k people who are part of this subreddit. I enjoyed your first post, but this is just getting annoying. (All the links are nofollow on reddit btw). Can we just be honest for a second here. No one on this subreddit is interested in buying a smoothie blender =/.

So first, did I read that right? You are doing guest posts with your content on someone elses site? Guest posts with 100% duplicate content? This will get you nowhere, and will more than likely end up damaging your SEO efforts.

Second, of course quality content is important. However, your site has barely any content on it. A few 1000 word articles is nothing. Do you honestly mean to tell me that on the second day of your sites existence, with less than 10k words of content, it is already ranked in google and getting 100 clicks from google search daily? Stop right there, because that is not happening.

The entire point of your site is to drive traffic to Amazon right? You SHOULD be worried about the affiliate stuff. Always be optimizing while at the same time providing value.

Probably the only solid advice here is that when starting a new site, the best way to go about getting your first traffic is to go heavy on social media. This traffic is great but will not rank you in Google on the second day of your sites life.

Harsh Reality, Brought to you by: Me

Edit: I found out how you are getting sales. It certainly is not because of this site it is because you are cookie stuffing reddit. Do not be an idiot man, you will get banned from the Amazon program. Trust me.

I'm interested in hearing what everyone would hypothetically do.

You can?? where? I'm paying about $10 per year for that shit.

Yeah his post comes off as melodramatic. The gofundme thing is cringy. He'll be angrily cashing a massive check soon. Fight the power!

Sounds like Caper Mattresses are filled with a bunch of dicks!

http://sleepopolis.com/blog/casper-sues-sleepopolis-with-federal-lawsuit/

Can you ELI5 what the owner did wrong?

Humble, where do you place your affiliate disclosures?

In the Titan case study posted earlier, he mentioned he found a great niche he didn't go with, Orthopedic mattresses.

Casper is going after the fact that the affiliate disclosure is at the bottom of the page rather than the top and being easily missed.

Sounds like I should definitely move my disclosure to the top of the page then. I know most sites don't but idk if it's worth risking a lawsuit

Yep I'm on page 1. These are very low search volume keywords though.

Thanks for the awesome answers. All makes perfect sense. I think I'll do some of the more technical tests further down the line once the site is pulling in serious traffic. Then I'll also know what tests will benefit the customers the most.

Glad I'm not in the mattress niche!

You guys clearly haven't read the whole lawsuit. Casper have a case.

This affiliate had a relationship with Casper and rated it as the best mattress while he was getting paid commission. After the affiliate program ended, he downgraded it to the worst mattress and directed traffic to other reviews; where he gets commission.

Among numerous other things that will take too long to explain. Read for yourself: http://sleepopolis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/caspers-original-complaint.pdf

Casper have a very strong case to prove that his reviews are influenced by commissions, and not based on his own personal opinion. He had no reason to downgrade Casper from best to worst; the product stayed the same. The change in affiliate commissions swayed his opinion - which is not in the consumers best interests.

It is my opinion, after reading the whole set of suit documents, that Casper are correct and will win the lawsuit.

I figured I’d slip one last case study in here before the end of the month. It’s been awesome to see so many case studies start in the last few weeks. keep ‘em coming!

My goal for this case study is to make 100k per year. I’m a beginner, so this is going to be ambitious for my first site, but hey, if success is an option, let’s go for it. So this case study will end when the total annual profit of my site hits $100k for any 12 consecutive month period. No time limit.

Let's see if I can do it in 2 years.

Month 1 Snapshot:

• 10 reviews, a few 2000+ words but most 3000+ words
• Ranking on page 1 of google for at least 2 keywords
• Text only. Almost no seo, no images, no backlinks
• Traffic: 189 pageviews (mostly me and bots)
• Monthly total: -$30.63 (hosting, privacy protection, email)
• 12 month total: -$30.63

Getting started - working efficiently

My niche is super technical so it has taken me a few months to learn enough about it to review products. The nice thing about this is that it creates a huge barrier to entry for potential competition. There are several other benefits to this niche:

• There are two other small review sites in my niche and that validate my niche, so I know I’m on the right track.
• The google trends for my keywords are decidedly positive with no signs of slowing down, and with christmas coming, the curve is now basically vertical, which is awesome to see.
• There are a range of products with prices from less than $10 to over $1000.
• There is huge market demand for transparency in my niche, which can be seen by customers posting on forums that they wish there were a site that compiled all product information in one place.
• There are lots of new products and keywords popping up every month.

I think my niche is a good one for all of these reasons. And I hope that it is large enough so that it won’t tap out before I hit the $100k per year mark.

In August, I wrote two reviews by typing them out while researching at the same time. That workflow proved to be intolerably slow though, at around 5-6 hours per 3000+ word article. The next two articles I tried researching first and then typing it all out in one go, which was slightly faster, but still took between 4-5 hours total. By that point, I also had the structure of each review pretty much nailed down.

Then I discovered the google docs dictation tool.

Dictation is where it’s at. It’s a total game changer. I have two screens, one with the a google doc open, and the other with a bunch of articles and amazon reviews open. I just speak the information from one screen onto the other, restructuring and repackaging it as I go.

Doing this I can write a 3000+ word review article in 1-1.5 hours when I’m really in the flow of it. The dictated text requires a lot of editing, but I can edit everything in about 30-45 mins. Then publishing it on my site takes another 10-15 mins (formatting included). So total time from blank google doc to published article is about 2.5 hours now. That’s a massive time saver.

Keep in mind though that I’m not adding photos, links or anything else to my articles at the moment. More on this next.

Where things stand now

Over the last month since going live, I’ve written 5 more articles, bringing my total to 10 reviews. They are individual brand reviews, not comparison reviews, which I know convert better. But I need to learn about the individual brands in my niche before I can make kick-ass comparison reviews.

Also, the reviews are just straight up text with no photos, only basic SEO and zero links. I will fix them up this coming month with stock images, links, etc. I’ve done it this way for two reasons:

• I wanted to see what would happen, because science/fuck you/’merica.
• I wanted to answer the question: “is my copy good enough to rank on page 1 of google and engage readers without any images, links, and minimal SEO?” Answer = Yes

To my surprise, even though my articles are text only and (IMO) poorly written with little SEO, some of them hit the first page of google after only 2 weeks. That was an awesome boost in confidence. Google page 1 rank = check.

Here is the snapshot from google analytics: http://imgur.com/imOcpVN

Most of the traffic is me and bots. The one interesting thing that I noticed was that someone spent a whopping 25:49 minutes on my site and visited 6 pages. Hell yes. Reader engaged = check.

I have so far spent $30.63 on hosting, privacy protection, and email using namecheap.com. That’s it. I am not going to put any more money into the site until it is in the black. Once the site is profitable, I have about $1000 allocated to put into content creation if I want to.

I haven’t gotten any backlinks or tried to create any. It’s too soon for that. I have no social media traffic either, but my niche seems to be pretty active on social media, so I’ll get that going this month.

Goals for next month

I’m going to continue to focus mostly on generating content next month. I would like to be able to produce at least one review a day, bringing the total to 40 for next month. Whether or not I can do this will be dependant on my time management and discipline. But now that I know about dictation, I should have a shot at it.

My site is in pretty bad shape design-wise. I know Wizzard says it doesn’t matter profit-wise, but I am going to spend some time making the site look better, if only for my own vanity. It’s like when you put on a nice suit and tie after months of sitting around in salty boardshorts, you feel like Jay Z with a fuckin cigar in your mouth. It’s just nicer to work on something you are proud to show other people.

I’m also going to fill in all of the posts with images, affiliate links, product tables, internal links, CTAs and I’ll fix up the on page SEO. Additionally, I should probably make better use of the subheaders in my articles, include a pros/cons list in the intro, and generally try make these massive walls of text more reader friendly. This is a technical niche though so I’m not sure how much I can reduce the reading level. That said, I realize that shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences engage readers more. It’s not my natural style but I’m learning. For instance, I had to edit this post to break down the fucking massive paragraphs into simply big paragraphs. And they’re still too long.

One other thing I’m going to do is make a bunch of resources for beginners in my niche. A long time ago, u/BOOGY_DOG suggested I make a glossary of terms for beginners. Excellent idea. There are a few other types of info resources that I can make so beginners in my niche don’t have to go hunting across the web. I’ve also noticed people in niche-related forums linking to a shitty little unformatted tablepress table on a competitor’s site that I can easily blow out of the water.

As I said above, I would like to see if I can generate some traffic from social media while organic search is ramping up over the next few months. This coming month I will set up social media campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, and IG. Pinterest has potential, but I’m not sure if that’s where my audience is. I’d also like to get on Sina Weibo just to see what happens. Have any of you had success on that platform?

I know absolutely nothing about social media marketing. I do have personal Twitter, IG, Snapchat and Pinterest accounts but I’ve never used them. Except for FB, it’s all totally new for me. But I’m pretty sure I can do a decent job figuring it out and setting it all up next week. After that, I’ll meet with someone I know who is a social media marketing manager for a locally famous sports entertainment venue in my city and get her feedback on my strategy.

Problems, Strategy and Questions

One weakness is that a lot of my keywords have low search volume. When I first did my keyword research, I didn’t really know what I was doing. So what I thought were awesome keywords are actually probably not that great, and the keywords that are good are very competitive already.

That being said, my niche is growing and new keywords with buyer’s intent are popping up every month. Also, humble has said in the past that he doesn’t think keyword rankings are very accurate since keywords that he is ranking number 1 for have much higher search volume than keyword tools suggest.

In any case, maybe I will just do my keyword research all over again. I don’t really trust the keyword research I did the first time, and it’s hard to strategize without the proper intel.

Top three questions I have for you all:

• For my privacy policy, I just copied it from a few other sites. I’m hoping that’s good enough until I have enough capital to hire a lawyer to write a legit privacy policy. I wouldn’t be concerned except that some of my reviews really bash some major brands. I’ve included names of some of the leaders of these companies because they are famous within the niche and customers will want to know about them. Not that they will care about my shitty little site, but I don’t want to pick a fight with the big dogs. Have any of you received blowback from companies you’ve negatively reviewed? How did you handle it? What do you put in your privacy policy to protect against that? Or should I just continue to not give a fuck?

• I think the informational pages on my site are going to drive a lot of traffic. For those of you in technical niches, did you run any physical/technical tests on products for your informational pages or reviews? Was the expense worth it? I’ve thought about sending some products to professionals to test some relevant physical properties, but that might be overkill and too expensive. My reviews are already much more in depth and useful than what’s out there. At the same time, if I did that, then my informational pages would significantly raise the bar for my competition and establish my site as the premier authority in the niche.

• Some of the products in my niche have very few customer reviews anywhere online (0 or less than 10 on amazon and less than 5 mentions on blogs/forums). However, they are popular products want to review. And some are products that the news media in my niche is going bananas over with a lot of “omg look at this” style articles. I expect customer interest in those products to grow quickly and I’d like to get in front of those customers ASAP. I could handle this by writing shorter reviews of those products with just the info I can find and beef them up later. My concern is that, with such skimpy information, I can’t really write much about the product, and that will look weird in context with the other 3000+ word reviews. What do you guys think? Wait till I have more info? Or just go for it and get ranking? Probably get ranking, right?

Final Thoughts

I’m interested in making connections with other serious newbies. Community is key to success and I’m a team oriented guy, so it would be cool to have two or three other people to chat with. I want to have a small round-table to bounce ideas off of. If any of you have started a site in the last month or two and want to pool your knowledge, shoot me a PM.

Thanks for reading this long ass post. I hope you got something out of it. Stay tuned for month 2.

Click here for month 2

Don't tell my boss I am wasting time on reddit

Who's your boss? Elon Musk?

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This is impossible with a domain holding escrow account. The domain is transferred to the escrow company. For example, see: https://www.escrow.com/services/domain-name-holding-escrow.aspx

After gaining some profit from a few online businesses (physical products), I've been looking to purchase a domain name for an affiliate reviews site that I plan to start. A domain reseller is offering domains 'for lease'. Has anyone ever rented a domain? Seems pretty weird to me, any tips or advice?

Do you recommend WP Super Cache or W3?

I installed WP Super Cache just because W3 hasn't been updated in over 6 months but everyone seems to still recommend W3.

Edit: Never mind, I have my answer. I just installed W3 and it increased both page speed and YSlow without even configuring it.

I uninstalled Jetpack. I'll likely add in Google Analytics myself without using a plugin. I also activated all the W3 Total Cache categories although it did change some of my css I assume during the minification process. That's probably my fault because I changed css in the wrong place. Thanks for the tips.

I'm using the enterprise pro theme but that was my own choice I didn't get a recommendation for it, only the Genesis framework was recommended. At this point my (possibly naive) belief is that I could have chosen from a variety of Genesis child themes and modified it to get the same result.

If you're using Nginx, I highly recommend setting it up to run your cache instead of a plugin. Less overhead on the server and I've found the speed to beat out W3. You can also grab a Nginx Cache helper for WP. I would grab the Git version though since its a later version. This keeps you from having to drop to the command line to clear the cache or writing your own php script.

If you're using Apache, you should think about switching to Nginx.

If you're using IIS...play more freecell.

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With the variety of posts on here sprinkled about of people explaining different internet marketing schemes for different revenue streams I sometimes find myself veering off target mentally from my original goal to make a $2000/month straight-up basic affiliate marketing site. Stop writing such great content everyone! I figure it's best to continue posting as I go to avoid any black hole of magical undocumented time I fail to post about and miss any important details as a consequence.

 

First off, what a slog. To me, nothing sucks more than to research, research, research about a particular widget, create a product table about said widget, write ~1000 words about said widget, find and post images about said widget, publish post about said widget, pat yourself on the back about completing said widget and go on to repeat the cycle for a slightly different alternative widget and on and on. Since my last post I've written a total of roughly 10k words for 9 out of 50 of my widget reviews. I haven't gone as fast as I've liked because I'm currently spending half my time stumbling my way around Wordpress and customizing the site to not look like shit, gathering and creating decent images, and spending enough time on product research to make the posts worthwhile. My V1 system for a post from start to finish is as follows:

 

Initially I google the product and find every major retailer in the search results that sells the product and I read the reviews. Some products in a category have over 1000 reviews, most of which I read/scan individually. In a previous post I mentioned I would pay particular attention to 3 star reviews but good or bad, right or wrong, I've since adopted an "eh-lets-read-them-all" mentality. As an aside, I also make a quick note in a separate google doc for each unique online retailer I gather user reviews from so in the future when this is all done I can have a customer FAQ explaining where exactly some of my review information is sourced. This step gives me a solid understanding of what people like and dislike about each widget including various tips and tricks to make the product better, make the product easier to set up, etc.

 

Next, I go to the manufacturers site to check on a variety of metrics (more on this later) that I use to determine the company's support for their product and their customers. Once I've finished this step it's time to get writing.

 

I'm structuring my blog posts in the following format:

 

At the top underneath the title I place a pricing table with the picture of the product and a bright shiny "check price on amazon" button underneath it (controversial I know). My hypothesis for this is that placing the pricing table at the top of the post and an associated "check Amazon" button gives my low-hanging fruit late-in-the-buying-cycle website visitors the most convenient opportunity to click right through to Amazon. Before I move onto what I put after the pricing table I want to digress a bit. In my experience a lot of the pricing tables I see on the less than spectacular affiliate websites are in my opinion unicorn figures. 4 star this, 2 star this, but nothing backing them up. Maybe affiliate marketers know more than me and have data that shows that people don't care about how those ratings were generated but I'm planning on playing it a bit different. I have 4 ratings that I calculate, each one on a scale from 1-100:

 

• Price
• Public Opinion
• Functionality
• Company Support

 

Here is a spreadsheet for an actual page I'm using to calculate my scores. Column B is the regular MSRP of the product on Amazon. Columns C-G represent the aggregated 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 star reviews found across all major online retailers for each widget. Columns I-T represent various meta-data and information about the widget and/or manufacturer and widget brand. All this information is used to calculate my review table scores starting on row 28. I intend to pass this information on somehow on my website for visitors to be able to read about in some kind of FAQ about how scores are calculated with the goal of establishing an extra layer of trust with them. Ok, digression over.

 

Underneath the table and the Amazon button is my blog post written in the following way:

 

Overview: A general overview paragraph of the product and an incentive to read on
What's Included: A bulleted list of the items included out of the box for each widget
Widget Setup: A longer section that details the steps to get the widget up and running with any tips or tricks to help ease the process and explaining where users might have trouble
The Court of Public Opinion: An even longer section that dives into what other widget owners think about it and what I've deducted as vital pro and con information about the widget
Company and Customer Support: A shorter paragraph analysis of how supportive the manufacturer is in regards to returns, responsiveness, etc (see spreadsheet above).
Bang for Your Buck: A few opinionated sentences that compare price to value from everything learned in my research
The Verdict: A short paragraph summarizing the key points and whether the widget is worth it or not.

 

That's basically what I have going on for content at the moment. I have two more menu items in my website's navigation menu for a blog and another informational tab but I haven't planned content for those yet. I'm just working on attacking these reviews. One possibly controversial opinion I'd like to disclose is that I've decided that I'm not afraid of spending time and writing a review on a product that is bad and displaying it in a bad light. Some widgets in my list of widgets to review are simply not that good or overpriced or have bad company and customer support. Rather than spin them on their heads and talk about the positive points in the hopes that users will click the Amazon button, my belief is that its not necessarily bad to write honest bad reviews. This leads to another hypothesis I have that viewers will appreciate the bad reviews and again help establish trust. The key for me is to include links to better alternative widgets within the widget's category to funnel visitors to a product with a higher chance at converting. Onto Wordpress.

 

Ok so Wordpress. I'll disclose I'm working off the Genesis framework. In my previous post I mentioned my site structure and linked a google doc to my planned pages, posts and categories. It hasn't really changed enough since that post to warrant discussion. Mainly I've just been beautifying and structuring the content within each page and post. I've already discovered my weakness on Wordpress and it's plugins. I know plugins are bad news if one whores themselves out to them but I like activating them, messing around with them and removing them once I realize they aren't that useful. It gives me a chance to become more familiar with the Wordpress system too. I plan on purging non-useful widgets as I become more knowledgeable about modifying things myself.

 

So far this is what I have installed, some for explicit reasons, some due to peer pressure and I don't know what they do yet, and others by default so they must be important?:

 

Askimet: I installed because it kept bugging me to. It apparently helps with spam which I hope will be useful when I actually have traffic
Contact Form 7: Creates a simple contact form with a shortcode
Custom Sidebars: To display different sidebars depending on the page being viewed. I'm using this because I want to display certain reviews in the sidebar that relate to what the user is viewing. If they are on the main thingy widget directory of reviews I want to show the top thingy widgets in the sidebar, etc.
Disqus Comment System: I saw this on thesweethome.com and I just mimicked them. It wasn't too hard to set up and it looks a bit nicer than the default commenting system Wordpress provides IMO.
Genesis eNews Extended: I forgot what this was for
Jetpack By Wordpress: Another default plugin I think does a lot but I haven't explored much yet
Magic Action Box: I have an email opt in on my home page that's all connected to Mailchimp and I use this plugin to display it. More often than not I read that it's important to start an email list from the get go so that's what I'm trying to do. I haven't planned an email strategy yet beyond just capturing emails.
Remove Category URL: I don't want the word "category" in the URL. Mainly because I'm probably OCD
Show IDs: Shows post and page IDs in the admin section since I don't have them displayed in the permalinks.
W3 Total Cache: I don't know what this is but I installed it because some say it's pretty useful.
WP Product Review: What I use for pricing tables

 

Pro tip #1: if you're going to style css directly, create a new css file and upload it via FTP! I made the mistake of modifying some css for the pricing table plugin and got it all looking better. Later on I went to update the plugin and it all reset. Don't make that mistake.

 

At this point all the posts I'm writing I view as rough drafts. Once I get all the posts published I will go back and link posts to other posts to create a healthy "linkified" site ecosystem, fix grammar, rewrite sections to be more engaging and add all the proper tags and crap to the images I eventually settle on for each post. For now I just want that text up there.

 

A couple other things I did was create and xml sitemap and submitted it to Google. There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do this. I don't know whether I did it too early or too late or whether I need to keep submitting it as I add or remove pages but nonetheless I did it. I also am beginning to email manufacturers for press packs and/or permission to use their photos on my website. I don't want to run into any trouble down the road. I set up 3 social media accounts for my new brand and linked them all to my site where they're displayed on my home page.

 

Ok that's all I have off the top of my head. I'm going to continue writing reviews and I'll be back when I'm further along with that.

Although I'm a baby in IM I keep looking at big authoratative sites and I keep thinking they are shit and that I could beat them. Their content is subpar, or their site is too clunky. They probably have a lot of links but I've seen sites with millions of links lose their status because they were clearly low quality. Any thoughts on that? Have you ever competed against smth big?

[removed]

It's all good I probably deserved it.

But yeah, I only meant to say the experience of being an entrepreneur changes you in the end.

I came here when I was 19 & knew nothing about business, I'm 22 now & have started 3 "successful" companies.

The farther down this road I go, the more I have problems relating to the "average" entrepreneur that I talk with.

Edit: And I'm not saying I'm rich or anything like that. I run a couple businesses & they let me live, that's all.

Would have been cool to go back and see OP's earlier posts to put this in context. Oh well...

You can tell he doesn't have a strong background in marketing, though. Definitely should have backlinked here to his earlier posts and included a link to his new Warrior Forum.

If by pedestal you mean I'm saying 3 years of experience has changed me, then I guess.

80% of businesses fail by year 1, even more fail by year 3. 3% of businesses are started by people 18-21 years old. Just statistically speaking it becomes harder and harder to relate with people the longer you do this. Even the older guys who are running a business, it's just not the same talking to someone who started their company when they were 35.

Edit: Not saying I'm rich or anything like that. I run a couple businesses & they let me live, that's all.

My problem: Amazon earnings are doubling or tripling every month and it's some nice cash now but I worry every day it's going to all slip out for underneath me (Amazon ban, Google update penalty, whatever).

My solution: Starting to work with different affiliate programs and try out different methods of earning money that aren't directly related to Amazon.

The problem here is that Amazon converts at 20% and the best I'm getting with my other affiliate is 5%. Solution: More traffic!

Hey guys, I wanted to run this by the community. I made a rookie mistake back in the beginning when choosing my niche by choosing a product that is technical and with which I have no experience at all. It's sort of like choosing to review car engines with no automotive background, or even ever having seen or ridden in a car. I know I can do this, but it has taken months to learn everything. I chose the niche back in September/october and I'm still working on my first reviews in part because I've had to research the crap out of this technical subject (a lot of this has also been due to having to learn everything from html/css to wp to hosting to content writing, etc.). It's a great niche though, so I'm going to see this thing through no matter how long it takes. But because I've made the mistake I made, I have three problems:

• At a basic level, it's harder for me to judge the veracity of the information I find on the internet, and I don't want to put the wrong info on my site

• I also don't have any good pictures of the products and their faults/highlights, nor can I readily acquire them

• I can't test the products if I were to buy them because I wouldn't know how to use them anyway.

So here's my plan. I'm going take a lesson from humblesalesman and just get my reviews out there on the site ASAP. I'm suffering from a distinct lack of speed right now because I'm bogged down in the details of learning about the product. Instead of worrying if I've covered everything and whether what I'm saying about the product is completely accurate (a lot of my info is just someone else's opinion anyway), I'm going to put it out there for the audience to judge. Then later on, once I've got the site generating a small amount of revenue, I'll invest in someone with domain experience to go back and fix the reviews up where it needs it. I am also going to use humble's technique of reaching out to people on forums for product photos. Long term, my goal is to be able to run tests on the products like sweethome and other sites do. But that might take a little while.

What do you guys think of this plan? I should be able to get these reviews up in a month or so. If it fails, I have another niche all lined up and ready to go.

[deleted]

I am really interested in getting into building affiliate marketing sites. I have built a few sites with very little success at this point but I am determined to keep trying. I have fun building these sites and I realize that the right site could have a lot of potential. Thisiswhyimbroke.com is my greatest inspiration so far. Does anyone know of any similair sites that I can draw motivation and inspiration from ? If anyone has any experience in building these sites, how did you start? What's your experience been so far? What are the most profitable amazon affiliate sites that you know of ?

Thanks.

My problem is that it's not really something that can be promoted easily on social networks.

Think an industrial strength bleach.. not really pinterest material you know?

Yes, I just read your case study. Are you using bots with Pinterest? What about your other sites do you drive traffic using Twitter and Facebook only or other sites?

backlink well

these are the important details.

Sorry, but this comment is really stupid (to put it bluntly). Do you think that some one who is earning $116k a year from just affiliates isn't successful?

The fact that his affiliate income is pretty much passive, and that he's earning just under $10k a month, he doesn't need it to grow any more. Of course it would always be nice, but I am sure that he has other ventures that take up his time, for example he recently launched his own podcasting software.

We have experimented with affiliate marketing but have had negligible success. These days I choose to invest my time elsewhere.

Be aware that there is a massive survivorship bias at play. People certainly manage to make a living with affiliate marketing, sometimes a very good living, but I suspect a huge majority of people make little or nothing before eventually moving on to something else. People will shout big revenue numbers from the rooftops while people not making money tend to keep that information to themselves.

Just don't assume that the stories you hear are typical. Expect a lot of hard work and a lot of failure along the way. Good luck :)

Hey man, have a quick question. So I followed your guide and found a niche according to what seemed like a good sized amount of searches relating to the category. It is a product relating to another product, for example like a tire for a car.

For driving traffic with Pinterest do I repin car's in this example? Like, find sexy cars and write about them even if it's barely related to the product I'm trying to pitch. My niche, just like car handles is not something sexy to write about or that I feel I can write tons and tons on. But it has the potential to be built out with similar items in it's category.

When I get the website up and stuff I'll send you a link if you don't mind critiquing.

How do you drive traffic to your sites specifically?

Thanks for this, I've been following your how to find a niche guide, found one that I can try to do just to get a feel for it.

On the front page of Google there's a site that gets listed 2-5 depending on search terms, with a PA and DA around 25, terrible content and layout, clearly affiliate marketing, probably did the site in an afternoon.

I figured it would be easy enough to beat according to reddit guides etc. But how the hell do I do it? Back links?

I've been reading about backlinks and I'm even more lost, currently have a list of about 10 sites to read through and get info from tonight, but man.. it's a much bigger deal than just putting up a site for sure.

I looked into their backlinks as I read it's a good option, just use the same ones, but they link from other sites clearly from the same guy, as well as outdated websites that no longer exist.

Can you point in the direction of a good backlinks guide for beginners?

What am I missing?

Any advice on how to move up the ranking other than backlinks?

I was just looking at your Build an affiliate website case study and all of your image links seem to be down.

Hey Humblesalesman, can't wait for your October report. One thing I'm curious about is that it seems like a lot of affiliate marketers will, when searching for keywords (for not only plausability but competition), use long tail keywords. In your maternity pillow case something like:

best maternity pillow material highest rated maternity pillows best stuffing for maternity pillow

What is your process for selecting these long tail keywords and how do you go about judging feasibility as to whether or not you can rank up past major retailers selling similar products? (i.e. if you google search my long tail keyword I used above, the first site that comes up is ebay)

Thanks for help and inspiration!

Do you plan on revealing the domain so we can see your progress?

Popping my cherry in posting here? Sure.

Firstly, I wanted to say that reading posts from /u/Humblesalesman and /u/W1ZZ4RD has given me enough confidence to do my research. So far, I have a chosen niche with at least fifty keywords which have above 500 in terms of traffic and are below 200 in terms of QSR (according to Jaaxy//SEO Strength). I have purchased the domain, I have relevant posts such as Privacy/About Me set up, and I even got a business email.

My big issue? Content creation. Yes, that cliche problem. Bear with me.

Because my chosen niche is related to Pokemon, sites such as commons.wikimedia, pixabay, etc. don't have many "Free" images. In fact, most of the images which I do want to feature are on Tumblr, which means wading into the murky waters of "using images for commercial purposes". Furthermore, I have no intention of becoming an "Authority" site because my goal right now is to set up multiple niche sites of a smaller but competitive scale. For that reason, I'm uncertain as to the content which I should include. Reviews often seem to be the domain of authority sites. Should I bother with reviewing individual Pokemon toys and cards? Or should I just take photos and comment on where the cheapest toys can be found on the internet?

And yes, my biggest concern is the image issue. Because the "free image" sites do not have the plethora of Pokemon-related content such as DeviantArt or Tumblr, I am uncertain how to wade through this troubled waters. Anybody willing to help a Garfunkel out and build a bridge together?

And yes, I'm an Aussie. No, koalas do not evolve into Dropbears.

I actually thought those two out! I remember you mentioning them in another thread.

Who is your target audience?

20-35 Male, Caucasian, American and Australian geeks. Thought about expanding to women, but after talking to my local Pokemon club, I noticed that most of them are guy anyway.

How are you adding value to this target audience?

Handy links to the places where the cheapest toys can be found; comparing Pokemon Card "Value Packs" against each other.

The problem is... images. Amazon images only take us so far, and I get frustrated that the best pictures of Pokemon belong to Nintendo or are on Tumblr.

Best advice I can give in this space is just go and do it. Don't wait and read more books or websites. Get your site up and running asap. You will learn a lot just from that.

I'm going to email amazon and respond here with the email.

Anyway the post still stands that using this method you can find quality reviews for products as well as my method of finding high quality amazon uploaded photos.

15k to reach the upper echelons of support. The dream!

Thanks for your outlook mate, helpful as always.

I'm going to take the email response into consideration and start emailing customers whether I can use their images. I think that way I have both bases covered.

If you were message the user on amazon if it were okay to use their photos do you think that would be fine? Does amazon really look that depth into your site as to find your site, then click back through to the review on amazon, trawl through the reviews until they find the photos and then take action against you?

At the end of the day, if you're providing extra value by using those customer images and it relates to extra conversions for amazon, should they have a reason to care?

Doesn't the operating agreement say that you can't use those user review photos? Or am I remembering it incorrectly?

Thanks mate. I was referring specifically in that last post to using the amazon uploaded photos, not customer photos!

Fun fact: the people who reply to your email are not qualified to interpret the Amazon Associates operating agreement. Amazon representatives have said this numerous times on their forums when people complain about "unjustified bannings".

Goddamnit, on the merry-go-round again! If amazon deems customer photos to be their property then there should be no issue using them. If they deem it's the customers property then there shouldn't be an issue providing you have customer consent. That's how I see it?

I'm not 100% sure on the answer but from /u/humblesalesman's post history:

On the topic of amazon, if you are signed up to their affiliate program they will let you use any image that is found on their website provided you are linking back to them.

Good point.

It's very hard sometimes to get good photos whilst not actually having the item in your possession. Do you think getting permission from the user would be fine?

Can you give us some examples of what Gravity Forms can be used for? Is this mainly used to create a multi-step landing page flow?

Thanks

You'd think that with so many "Top 10 MUST Have Wordpress Plugins " this is an obsolete post but I'm afraid it isn't. In my experience, the authors of such lists rarely put in the time to review them in-depth and form an educated opinion, lists are easy.

The more I learn about plugins, the more I notice how many of them are coded without attention to efficacy. Bloat, hidden "pro" features etc. I thought it would be useful to compile a selection of efficient plugins that help our visitors have an awesome experience. I only know of w3 total cache as a must, what do you use that you wouldn't live without?

To recap, recommend plugins fill these criteria: Highly efficient, useful and light.

After looking at several niche sites I noticed that a lot of them use up-to-date price data. I guess they use some sort of plugin for that.

Do you have any experience regarding a) such plugins and b) are they effective. Does it matter to the user to know the price beforehand. I would imagine updating prices by hand is rather impossible.

Then again reading through /u/humblesalesman posts he said that he updated a lot of the content by hand (like on a yearly basis). But this was rather regarding if the product was still available - not the price:

I am spending most of this month swapping out expired links and obsolete products in preparation for the Christmas period on my existing websites (from the 7 types of affiliate sites post)

/u/Akial in your research did you also take those price-plugins into account?

Hey guys,

So like a lot of you, thanks to the never-ending fountain of knowledge from /u/humblesalesman, /u/W1ZZ4RD (and the rest of you who have shared your informative experiences and case studies), I recently took the plunge and set up an affiliate site. It's been a hell of a humbling (and illuminating) 3-week ride so far, and I'm learning every day which I think, at this point at least, is the real mission.

A couple days ago, I got to thinking about a possible idea for this sub that may help those of us who are currently working on our affiliate sites, as well as those who are interested but still unsure about whether this is a good choice for them. What if we set up a monthly mod-sponsored meetup thread where those of us who are currently working on our sites have the option to post about our experiences in the last month. The specifics could be carved out later, but just as a preliminary example, a typical post could go something like this:

• Type of site: affiliate review site / lifestyle blog
• Social media: pinterest, facebook
• # months active: 1 month
• Visitors this month (optional): 500
• % change in traffic over previous month: -15%
• Clicks (optional): 500

• Purchases (optional): 23

• Victories: this past month saw my traffic from pinterest increase due to XYZ....also, I was able to write 2 guest posts which provided a nice bump in traffic...etc

• Struggles: I A/B tested a new front page which I think confused a lot of visitors, since XYZ....I fell a couple slots in google for one of my major keywords, which made me lose quite a bit of organic search traffic... etc

• Agenda this month: etc etc

• Questions: does anyone have experience effectively utilizing XYZ when trying to do ABC?

More or less, that's what I'm envisioning. Now I'm pretty inexperienced in affiliate marketing so I have no idea if this actually would make us all worse off, but I have a feeling it would be both a good way to learn from each other as well as have something to look forward to every month. We could even defer this thread to a couple months down the line when the majority of us have more experience to share around.

Anyways, I'll leave it up to you guys to decide!

Have you used Sedo again? I havent tried it myself, but what I;ve heard about it hasnt been great. The folks at WarriorForum just launched Freemarket.com - I figured I would try that next.

I recently wrote about my experience selling some my old domains from failed/defunct startups on Flippa. It ended up being a bit of a rant, but I would be interested in hearing others' experience with selling domains on Flippa:

http://muhammadatt.tumblr.com/post/95129668261/why-flippa-sucks-for-selling-your-unused-domains

but would the time be better spent working on getting backlinks from high PR sites where you're truly just playing a numbers game? But they're legitimate. Or is it better to buy some old high PR sites that you can build up with some decent, but low effort, content and get backlinks from them...?

How long do you want to hold the site? I use PBNs on sites that I plan to burst up to the top and them dump them as fast as possible. If you are building something to stand the test of time, go for the whitehat approach but know that it will be a lot slower.

And a sidenote: Charlie floate is a fucking clown.

exactly

https://www.seroundtable.com/charles-floate-arrested-19340.html

I was wondering if there is any value in implementing a social proof plugin (as seen on trip advisor: "x just booked into y") for an affiliated site. Though I can't get real time information on if a person bought the product, I could theoretically notify viewers if someone left the site to check out the product, how many bought was through my site per day, and what others are doing on the site (x just checked out -relevant- y article, could be useful for retention). Among other relevant information that could result in a buy.

I would have to modify existing plugins, or end up building my own. It has been proven that social proof like this works for online shopping, and the goal is to get them to buy the product... What do you guys think?

I guess I'll build it then, after its done, is there anyone that would like to join me in A/B testing the plugin? I don't think my site is pulling in enough visitors to get enough data to really see what's will happen.

In fact, I think it's mostly art. I am by no means qualified to offer advice but I wanted to share my journey and opinion thus far. My impression is that most everything you read about (white hat) affiliate marketing how-to's, tips, tricks and tools boil down to two words; Provide Value. If those words are treated like the north star, then all the other necessary decisions will fall into place on their own. Aside from the basics, I don't believe you need to become a master backlink analyzer or a keyword density guru. With all of the crap out there, it can be easy to drown in the ever-changing overabundance of information about what you should and shouldn't be doing. There's no perfect tool and there's no perfect resource. The only tool worth learning and perfecting is your own intuition.

I'm not very far on my journey but here's what I've done so far:

1) As I'm sure many have done, I read through humblesalesman, w1zz4rd and a few other's entire post history to gather insights. Browsing through entrepreneurial subreddits helped me find people who have had success, and a lot of them have rich post histories that yield some solid nuggets of information. Knowing that information from trusted redditors is provided without an ulterior motive makes said advice more actionable.

2) I went to Amazon best-sellers and sifted through products at a price point of approximately $100. Using Google's Keyword Research tool I put in phrases around my product category and found the umbrella phrase of my product category was getting a lot of traffic and not a lot of competition (e.g. "thingy widget reviews" as opposed to my "thingy dingy widget reviews").

3) I threw my words into an incognito window and analyzed the top 10 results. Basically, are all 10 of these sites providing a lot of value? That's entirely what I based my research on, going through the questionable ones, reading the copy, clicking around and eventually determining if I could write and design content better than the website. It turns out that there were a couple sites that I deemed "certified crap" in the top 10.

4) I'm now in the building phase of my site. Rather than research the "best" site design, what the perfect thing to put above the fold is, or what the proper percentage of keyword density per page is, I just started browsing crappy affiliate sites on Google's top 10. For example, one thing I googled was "best kitchen faucets". That seemed like a solid keyword with 5,400 monthly searches. Lo and behold I found kitchenfaucetdivas.com on result 6 with the tagline "best buying guides for 2015" and we're 2 weeks into 2016. So I grabbed their sitemap (kitchenfaucetdivas.com/sitemap.xml), threw it into a Google spreadsheet, and page by page calculated the volume of information they put on each page (results here). That's one data point for an actual affiliate site performing well on Google and it's not even that great of a site IMO with only 35,403 words in total. Rinse and repeat for several sites and now I think I have a clearer picture of a baseline criteria to implement on my own site in my own niche as far as website structure, article lengths, etc.

I'm not writing this to express what I did, but rather to express what I didn't do. I didn't check for backlink juice. I just looked for sites that didn't look good and didn't seem to provide a lot of value through my eyes. I didn't spend days finding the perfect 4 word long tail phrase in the perfect keyword research tool. I just found a good buyer's keyword that had a decent amount of volume. I didn't try and find the perfect website theme, I just installed one that a successful redditor recommended numerous times in their post history. My next step is reading the copy on successful affiliate sites and copyblogger to understand good structure and form so that I can better communicate and provide valuable content to my potential visitors.

Could my lack of research and understanding come back and bite me in the ass? Maybe. Are products around $100 a bad price point to target? I'm sure there's arguments to be made. Might I have less success because of something else I overlooked? It's likely. All I know is that I'm trying to use my intuition and using Provide Value to guide my rudder through this process. I won't let it be rocket science.

This is one of the most important pieces of advice; totally agree that everything has come down to value.

I do a lot of the same things you do, most notably observing other successful affiliate sites. And do you know the one stand-out thing I've noticed? 90% of the time, the top sites are not the ones that have the most links or the highest keyword density. The top sites are content-rich and provide a ton of value in an easy-to-understand way.

This next part is my opinion, but it seems that as Google's search engine gets smarter, it is moving away from number of links or most keywords and giving higher ranks to the best value-providers.

So with that being said, go value!

Thanks Humble. I honestly meant to put (just kidding) in the title to avoid losing people who may have not decided to click through. Can you edit that title by any chance?

Creating value is an excellent takeaway from the post. I really believe that when you're trying to get off the ground over-delivering will truly help you.

I do also want to mention that dealing with people is not easy. It's not supposed to be easy. With practice you learn to manage your clients and they all have to be managed in a unique way.

On an affiliate marketing note: I just identified another niche that I'm going to start writing content for today. I'll be back here with another post showing my affiliate earnings soon. Mark my words.

Edit: I whole-heatedly agree. The feeling of creating something and succeeding is one of the greatest feelings.

[insert top 10 list of books, self-promoting blog post and affiliate links here]

In all seriousness- forget the list of books, the software you think you need, or what the "guru" is saying. Just Start.

A few years back I received a postcard from a local real estate agent in the mail. The postcard had the agents website listed. I was finishing up college at the time and had a great interest in marketing (still do...). I typed in the website and was brought to the GoDaddy parked domain page. I thought to myself, "well that's odd, this real estate agent is spending all this money on these direct mail pieces advertising his business and he didn't even have a live website.

I connected with the agent on LinkedIn and sent him a message with a brief bio about myself, just a couple websites that I made for myself in the past and I told him that I'd love to build his website for him.

He responded a few hours later and we set-up a meeting with myself and his team. We didn't discuss pricing. I just knew I wanted to prove to him that I could do this and help his business, but more importantly I wanted to prove it to myself. He was extremely happy with the outcome of the site. I did it for only $500 (could obviously have charged more, but the amount of business I've gotten from him and connections I've made has made this more than worth it).

Anyway, years later I still do work for his biz, his daughters business and his sons business. And I've made many other connections that have lead to more work and built up some more confidence as well.

Sorry for the misleading title, but the moral of the story here is just to go out and do it. Start now. You won't regret it.

I really look forward to learning from everyone in here, especially /u/humblesalesman next case study. I tried an affiliate site last year when he first put this out, didn't do enough research and choose a terrible niche and kind of got discouraged. I have 2 affiliate sites that I'm currently continuing to add content on each week and I'm excited to see where they take me.

I agree that it's all just about marketing (as you put it ALL the time). And marketing is all about being a person and putting yourself in the shoes of your customer.

I will be the first to admit that it's a metric S#!+ Ton of work to do it this way but I have a good feeling that the connections I've made will actually stick around because they are based on something real.

For a future case study I'm want to write something about using contests to build up a following on an aff site - it seems to be working pretty well.

Thanks for the kudos.

Hey all, I posted this over at r/entrepreneur and it was removed – not sure why since I truly think the post is valuable but, we shall see… Maybe my original title was too “click-baity” (5 tactics I used in the past 2 weeks to grow my email list by 24,900%)

Does this belong in this sub? I think so since technically the site I'm building is 50% affiliate links.

We were discussing email list building in a private group and sharing our successes for the week. I shared my results from the past 2 weeks and several people thought I had found some sort of secret sauce or way to cheat so they asked me to do a full write up. I'm sharing part of that post with you today.

Basically, they didn’t believe that I was able to grow my list from 8 to 1897 (and growing) in just two weeks – But I did and I did it by focusing on 5 main things. I’ll share them below and hopefully you find them useful.

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TL;DR I grew my email list by 24,900% by being human and thinking like my target audience.

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Here are the five things I focused on in the past 2 weeks to grow my email list (hint: it’s all about being a real person and providing some value):

1. Forums & Groups

I have been a member of some great forums and groups for writers (think Reddit, Facebook, KBoards, etc.). Normally I just lurk and read the advice that everyone else provides. But over the past three months I have made a concerted effort to share my knowledge with others — when/where I can.

Since my target audience doesn’t hang out on r/entrepreneur or r/juststart you might notice that I haven’t been around here very much. That’s intentional since I am trying to focus on my group (that doesn’t mean that I don’t come hang out, it just means that it’s not my primary focus).

I try and provide REAL value. I answer questions. I ask good questions. I stimulate discussion. I share some of the great resources I uncover. I give feedback when people ask and occasionally I pepper in what it is I’m doing or how I came across whatever it was that I shared.

Because of this I find many people say they are interested in hearing more about this “resource directory” I’m building so I drop the link. There are lots of lurkers out there and I’ll see several more signups from this than the number of people in the discussion.

Takeaway: Find your audience. Join their tribe. Provide some value first, then tell them what you’re doing.

2. Social Media

I like to compare social media to standing on a street corner with a megaphone – most people just ignore you since across the street are 3 others doing the same thing. It’s a hard nut to crack for me but I’ve added it to my strategy anyway.

I think this goes without saying but I have posted stuff about my site on Twitter and Facebook. It’s difficult to really provide value on social media unless you have a lot of time. I don’t have time so my strategy with social media (for better or worse) is mostly push & share.

What that means is I follow and like a lot of the people who are part of my target audience. Then I share stuff that I see that I think they will like. Every so often I’ll drop a question or a link to my site and tell people they can get more information if they join the list.

I’m looking to hit this a lot more in the coming weeks but the strategy won’t change much. I’ll still share great stuff and then schedule posts throughout the day. Not very novel but it seems to be working.

Albeit this is one of the lower converting types of traffic and I haven’t seen many people from social media actually sign up – but they do like to enter contests (see below)!

Takeaway: Social takes time but you can still reach your target audience. Sometimes you have to share other people’s content to get them to notice you then you can interact with them.

3. Team up with Influencers

It doesn’t take long to find some of the bigger “players” in the writing and self-publishing field (that’s my target group). I have uncovered some new influencers that have their own following that I didn’t even know existed (sometimes they’re the folks that create the awesome stuff I find).

Most of them are more than willing to help you out if you offer them something of value as well. Like it or not these people have the WIIFM mentality as well. If you can come to the table with something they want then they will be willing to reciprocate.

Want an example? I contacted several people who had mentioned they had a problem trying to get a handle on a resource list or submission process to control the amount of services and “spam” (their words) on their forums. I messaged them and let them know that I had a similar problem and that I had come up with a solution that might help them out — I said they could send all their requests to me and I would aggregate them for them.

This way it takes the burden from them, gives me more resources (or at least a contact) and solves the problem. A few of these influencers will be featuring my site in their groups/forums once we go live and several of them have already started sending people to my landing page.

Takeaway: Even people “in power” & “with power” have problems. If you can provide a win-win solution then they will almost always be willing to help out — and send people your way.

4. Reach out to the people/products I feature

This was one that I almost overlooked before it smacked me in the face one day.

I know if you mention someone else’s blog or product in a post, you should reach out to them and let them know you like their stuff and you’re going to give them a link. Usually this results in a few shares or a mention on social media (and if you’re lucky you might get a link back). However my brain blocked this out until I realized that my entire site is basically one big backlink pool for these people. I should let them know they’re being featured.

I started reaching out and it’s had some great results. Here’s the best part: when I let some of them know that they’re product/service is being featured on my site I’ve found a few of them have offered up some free stuff that I can give away in the coming weeks. So I’ll have some signed books, free courses, free software and other great stuff that I can use in my “contest” phase.

On top of that, since this is a user-ranked site I’ve found that many of them are more than willing to share with their followers & email lists in order to get them to vote-up their resource when we go live. It makes sense that this is going to help them out quite a bit in the future and it’s already helping me (and will continue).

Takeaway: Spread the love. If you mention someone don’t think they’ll find it on their own. Sometimes you have to let them know that you like their stuff before they’ll notice you.

5. Contests & Giveaways

If you haven’t yet seen the power of a giveaway yet, you might be in for a fantastic surprise. Some people have been using giveaways to grow their lists by 5K subscribers each week. You want more than that? It’s possible.

It’s all about what you’re willing to give away. If you want a bunch of folks on your list then you can try giving away an iPad. But I wouldn’t recommend that type of growth unless your site/product has mass appeal. You don’t just want people on your list, you want TARGETED people on your list — whatever that might mean for you.

My site appeals to writers, authors, indies and self-publishers. That means I need to pick prizes that appeal to only those types of people. To start I decided to give away 10 of the most recommended books on writing craft and in the future I’ll give away some of the stuff I mentioned above as well as some great writing and book marketing courses.

There are quite a few apps, plugins and hosted services for hosting giveaways (I know, I have 7 of them in that category already) I chose to go with Gleam.io since it was very nice looking, offered quite a few options and really was the easiest for me to use. You should check them out since you can build a free contest just to test it. Because of the power of this method, I’ve decided to do monthly giveaways after we go live to continue to grow the list and keep people talking about me.

Takeaway: Don’t be afraid to give some stuff away in exchange for an email. Make sure whatever it is speaks to your audience.

What I didn’t do (hint: I wasn’t a douchebag — I hope):

• I didn’t add people without asking their permission
• I didn’t spam forums and groups without providing some sort of value OR establishing myself first
• I didn’t mass-email the people/products I featured. I sent over 250 individual emails in one week (I’m lucky I didn’t get flagged as spam myself). I have many more email/tweets/FB messages to send. I added personality and I added details that you can’t “automate” so they knew it was personal.
• I didn’t sit back and HOPE — I went out and actively built my list.

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That’s it, you might see that there wasn’t anything special about what I did. Maybe you learned something or maybe you were reminded of something you learned already but forgot about. Hopefully it was helpful.

You can do this too. It’s not hard but it takes time and you have to change the way you think. You give first and many will reciprocate.

Final Important takeaway: provide value and help people.

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Do you have any additional tips or ideas for how I could have done even better?

EDIT: even with editing I still had a typo!

A subreddit dedicated to niche sites? Where have you been all my life? Glad to be here, I can tell there is a lot of valuable stuff to look through. I will introduce myself with my current experience of building niche sites for the past year (fairly new to the game.) There will be some great tips for newbies and probably some laughable parts for the advanced guys.

My first couple of affiliate sites were complete failures. I went into it knowing about keyword research but knowing nothing about guaging the competition. The result was a site built around a high volume keyword but too much competition to rank for.

This was my first blow to the solar plexus. My second site bombed again. This time I was ranking decently but for keywords that didn't have a whole lot of monetary potential. What I call "info" keywords - keywords where people aren't looking to buy products. Keywords like DIY x or how to fix X for free. These are keywords you want to avoid, unless you're monetizing with adsense, and even then I avoid them unless I'm building a huge authority site.

I had no idea how to monetize my sites properly. I was wondering why nobody was clicking on the one little amazon widget I had in the sidebar. I thought it surely make a few sales but it never did. Since I spent a lot of time writing the content this was another crushing defeat. However, I persisted.

For my next site I worked night and day to find a profitable niche where people were eager to buy stuff. One day I woke up, took my nootropics, and then it hit me...nootropics. The niche had been right under my nose the whole time. Sometimes you just have to pay attention to your immediate surroundings. Find obscure shit that people pay for. Even the scrooges have that one thing they spend money on. That's where you'll find the niches.

Anyways, I built the nootropics site and started affiliating with a supplier. For months I made nothing. Then something amazing happened - I logged into my affiliate panel and noticed my first commission. I was beyond ecstatic as I had been working on this for a while with absolutely zero results.

I started hanging around affiliate communities and picked up some good advice like techniques to uncover keywords, adding my site to Google webmasters, on page seo, etc. Really, I think a lot of success in this business comes down to implementing many small details - details you can only learn from experience.

I began to rank on the first page for major keywords like "vendor X review" One month I made over a hundred bucks with this site. Don't let the big fish tell you that $100 bucks is not a significant achievement. If you can make $100 you can make $1000 and so on. later on, Over the course of a week I noticed that I wasn't getting any commissions. I went to my site and it was completely down - Hostgator had a fuck up on their end and my site had been down for over a week without my knowing. I was further crushed to see that Google had dropped me from the SERPS completely. Although some of the results came back when I put the site back online, many of my very profitable keywords did not. I quickly began to realize that shared hosting was a complete joke. Having worked in I.T. previously, I knew how to operate a VPS so now all of my sites are hosted there. Apache virtual hosts FTW.

I was too burnt out on nootropics to attempt to re establish the site to its former glory. I found a new niche in the MLM space and have been doing quite well with that one. It's currently raking in a few hundred bucks a month on complete autopilot.

I'm now working on a site in the survival niche - it's competitive but that's where I've learned the money is at. I also don't mind writing the content. I guess you could make a lot of money writing blender reviews but who in their right mind could suffer through that? Anyways, here are a few lessons I've learned:

Your content has to be over-the-top good - Google isn't going to rank a crappy 400-500 word blog post that sucks. Further, nobody is going to link to it. Good content is the foundation of your niche site. Put real effort into creating a resource that people find valuable.

Money words - Best X for Y, X vs Y, X Review, etc

Profitable niche sites don't happen overnight - For some reason I thought that I would start making money as soon as my site was online. It takes months to years before you will see any decent rankings in the SERPS.

Autorespnder for all niche sites - have a way to capture leads and setup a 7 day autoresponder sequence. I'm not a pro at this but you're leaving a lot of money on the table if you're not collecting leads.

Keep going - As the subreddit says - just start. Once you start, keep going. Don't allow your niche site to stagnate. Write content everyday because one day that site will pay your bills.

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To go along with those first person claims, do you usually make up a fake name and persona for the reviews? What I mean is, if you are going to write "I tested this product" then there has to be someone who is the 'I' of that sentence. So do you just make that person up? hmm... I guess I'm ok with that. It's not much different than writing "Our company is X and we do Y" when in reality it's just me...

Thanks for the insight, Humblesalesman. I think I have some resistance to making those 1st person claims, even if they originally came from a real user. But hell, if that's the game, then that's the game. I'm here to convert readers to buyers.

Is there consensus on whether writing reviews in 1st or 3rd person is better?

In first person, you're commenting directly on the product. 3rd person, you refer to the comments other users made on the product.

I think 1st person is harder, because if you combine multiple reviews it takes effort to make them seem all of a piece. But it seems to give more authority to the review versus saying "Many people noticed the high quality of the product," for example.

Thoughts?

In your experience how well did you manage to scale your own experience and quality by hiring writers? Since these people are paid and don't have personal stake in the site did the quality suffer or do you feel like you were able to maintain it while scaling?

According to Recode, the New York Times is buying The Wirecutter for $30 million. Thought it was relevant since there was a related discussion on the post Site to Watch a few months ago.

My thoughts on this:

• Creating a high quality affiliate site has once again been validated by this fairly big and prestigious acquisition.
• Perhaps affiliate sites should be built with an acquirer in mind. It shouldn't be the forefront of your decisions, but perhaps something to keep in mind.
• If you do plan on being acquired, keeping separate expenses and records for the individual site is key to not run into headaches later

Would be interested to hear everyone else's take!

Edit: Notes from Recode interview below:

I listened to the podcast interview at the bottom of the Recode article, and it's pure gold. These are my notes, but I highly recommend listening to the interview in full to get the full context:

Awesome interview before selling for $30mm to NYTimes. Interview in June 2016. They were purchased October 2016.

• Went to secret business conference where everyone would share revenue. Everyone talked business first, he talked content first.
• Site was built out as content-centric, start just with content to begin
• When asked about how they made money, he dodged the question first and talked about the quality and purpose of the site
  • Their purpose is to make shopping less painful
• They write these long excessive guides but they don’t “bury the lede” which is key
• People can purchase after reading for 5 minutes, or they can keep going
• The site only has 1,000 pieces of content
  • Many other sites produce that in a week
• They’re not paying bots to write articles, they’re paying real people
• They look at themselves as a utility. Measure themselves on how helpful they are. It’s common sense
• Every time someone buys something on their site “they get a couple bucks"
• It just works out in the end
• Some of their guides, they don’t recommend anything. On some of them, they don’t get paid
• At the macro level: “shopping sucks, we make it easier"
• They work with consumer reports, they like them. He’s not trying to create another consumer reports. CR is harder to understand their recommendations. WireCutter has more of a conversation.
• 8:30 - They’ve done collaboration with other papers. Including the New York Times hint hint!
• They told the NYTimes to treat them like a freelancer. Old tech columnist was kind of lazy 😃
• Tech columnist wasn’t willing to find out the best cheap printer
  • The Wirecutter put in the 100 hours to do the research
• As a columnist, they really don’t have much time to write these things
• The pieces provide by the Wirecutter were some of the most powerful pieces they have ever seen
• 10:20 - Whats funny is that business people are so seduced by the power of scale. Brian Lam looks at scale as the quality of the work, most business people look at the quantity.
• They’ve mastered the tactic of when to best update an article, what time of year
• A competitor wrote a piece that became out of date right away, the Wirecutter watched as they didn’t update for 45 days
• Business people don’t understand the need to spend time on quality articles, content. Editors want it but don’t have support from the business people.
• He doesn’t think people can catch up for another 5 years, since they’re working on new things.
• He went to business school, hated it, but became useful later.
• Got kicked out of CES for turning of TV screens when part of Gizmodo. Got sort of a bad boy reputation.
• 17:45 We loved it and hated it. I really don’t care about a lot of it. It’s service.
• It was stressful pumping out 12 posts a day at Gizmodo. Felt like a bunch of noise.
• The average consumer didn’t care about the latest tech news, they just wanted to know what TV to buy.
• They don’t take a trade approach. They are not beholden to the business.
• 20:10 - People don’t need advice on iPhones, they’re going to buy them no matter what. They focus on what makes a difference. Very academic approach.
• Generally media people don’t make good CEOs. But they should keep in mind storytelling and narrative. Marketers talk about storytelling, but it’s not the core of who they are. They have a very mission-based culture, which has mad things easier. Business people just go in and try to grow as fast as possible.
• Brian Lam started the Wirecutter from his friend’s couch in Hawaii. Couldn’t afford his own place.
• 60 people at the company. No investors, bootstrapped. He’s good at delegating, doesn’t really run day-to-day, it’s running. After 4 1/2 years he was able to fully delegate.
• Caught 1,000 waves in a year
• 24:30 - Can other people replicate his success? There’s a balance in knowing that you’re a freak, but also not being too distant from other people. He thinks about things differently. Everyone should try. Everyone can do it, but not everyone believes they can.
• 30:00 - Reading books on Apple really prepared him for call from Jobs asking for iPhone back. Jobs got really mad when Gizmodo started telling him what to do. Jobs used to being the boss (snot-nosed punks).
• 32:20 - They want to do different verticals, but want to do them mindfully. Not ever vertical needs “the best”. Might do fashion next (Brian doesn’t want to disclose it).
• They only want to do it because they think it can be helpful (and there’s a business opportunity).
• There has to be a business opportunity.
• The business serves what they’re trying to build.
• 34:20 It’s unbelievable how many people don’t get it on the business side of media.
• The thing they don’t get: they should make money, but it should make some really cool editorial mission happen. If you don’t, it becomes a hollow thing where you’re going trend to trend chasing dollars.
• People from a competitor who goes wider and shallower have told Brian that they wouldn’t trust their own content. The competitor has started to crater. “Google smells bad content, readers smell bad content, Facebook smells bad content."
• Acknowledging the power of organic search: Brian doesn’t try to beat Google, just creates awesome stuff.

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I'm thinking of signing up for Docusign and having my merchants sign a document that states "I agree to pay X per month + Y per volume" within 28 days. In the past I've had issues collecting in a timely fashion and only some of my clients have signed an actual agreement.

My process right now is usually I provide a quote for our services (which require no setup fee) and our billing is a flat fee per month and then a fee for volume which varies based on use. Something simple that states what the service costs and the cost for metered use would be suffice. Anything that would allow me to take people who do not pay for multiple months to court.

I'm a penny pincher so I prefer checks and don't have time to setup an automated billing system at the current time.

edit: if anyone is a lawyer and wishes to put this together (paid of course) PM me.

Thanks /u/Humblesalesman - I always find your advice very actionable.

I'm going to sign up for a newbie account at ahrefs (is it worth the lite package at this early stage?) and sift through the back links.

The articles on the competitor's site in position 1 are actually very good, but the articles on position 2 competitor's site seem less well written (they cram more affiliate link products into each article).

OK, next step - setting up my website! Cheers.

position 1 has a page authority of 1 and domain authority of 39, position 2 has a page authority of 16 and domain authority of 23).

If you're new to affiliate marketing and SEO, this is going to be harder than you think. This is the one thing I think Humblesalesman doesn't realize how hard it is for newbies. It's not easy (IMO) to build your DA to that level as a new domain.

That being said, you can still outrank them for longtail keywords. Just get started, it costs you probably 20$ for hosting and a domain. Don't expect results for the first few months.

So as the calendar ticked over to August I decided to get serious about exploring some opportunities in affiliate marketing.

And I think I've found my niche.

• It's a subject I have a keen interest in and feel excitement about exploring further.

• It's got some pretty good metrics in the Google Keyword Tool (14,800 monthly searches, medium competition)

• It seems to be trending upwards based on what Google Trends shows me. (Here and here.)

• There are a couple of affiliate sites on page 1 that seem beatable (using the MOZ toolbar... position 1 has a page authority of 1 and domain authority of 39, position 2 has a page authority of 16 and domain authority of 23).

• There are lots of related products on Amazon (prices ranging from $10 - $150) and some have over 1,000 reviews.

• I buy products in this niche.

However...

• All but the .com exact match domains are readily available. (An indication that there's little to no value - or that there is untapped potential?)

• One of the competing sites (position 1 on SERP) has over 11,000 external backlinks from more than 1,600 referring domains.

• I am completely new at this.

Should I go for it? And am I better off to go with a .com brandable name that is related to the product/category or should I register one of the other exact match domains that are available?

Thanks to /u/humblesalesman and the rest of /r/entrepreneur for the case study that I have followed to get this far.

Generating links for Amazon products is super simple- they have the tool bar, you go to the product and click the link generator on the tool bar.
Ebay's isn't intuitive at all. I've only found this for a Link Generator. Am I missing something or is this the only way to do it?
Most of the products I want to link to are on ebay and not Amazon

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This isn't something I see talked about very often, either here or /r/entrepreneur. So I thought we might be able to get a good discussion going.

I actually have two questions:

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1. What's your email drip look like?

I'm considering setting up a 3-part autoresponder series to start with. Currently, I have about about an 800 user email list and just send out a welcome email. Not a huge list, but it's growing pretty steadily, and I'd like automate this process a little.

I currently use Mailchimp Free, but am considering Getresponse or Aweber, or whatever alternative you guys recommend.

What do you include in each email?

2. What are your thoughts on offering a free niche-relevant gift(where they just pay shipping), and actually shipping them the product?

This may be something only I can answer through testing.

A good chunk of my email list came through offering a free niche-relevant Clickbank offer, where they sign up and I send them the link to the offer. They were aware of the $5 shipping price upon signing up. I've since stopped getting sign ups this way, just because Clickbank comes across as spammy and is blocked by adblockers.

I think it said something similar to 'Sign up to receive the best [insert niche] weekly deals on the web, and we'll send you a free [niche] gift! (just pay shipping)"

I've found a similar product from Alibaba, factored in shipping, packing materials, and I could buy+ship this for $3.40. $1.60 profit each signup that actually checks out. Multiply that by a couple hundred people a month, and that could add up. I could send them a "coupon" once they sign up that knocks the price down to $0.00, and they can check out right on my site.

It might be a ton of work, but it also might be something where I put together a couple hundred packages on a Saturday and just slap on shipping labels once an order is placed. I realize a lot of you make a ton of money from affiliate marketing, so an extra few hundred a month doesn't seem worth it to you. but to someone who makes around $250 a month, a few hundred is a pretty good amount. Still undecided whether or not to try this out.

I never really understood the scepticism around posts like these and the adsense one. Of course it's entirely possible, but it's not a get rich quick scheme which most are looking for round here.

Like most rewarding things in life, it requires a lot of work and determination.

I have this odd problem with one of my sites. I have this site and one of the post is where I tell people what to look for when buying a product and I also give tips. This has established me as an expert, which I would say I am.

I know this product and its industry inside and out which has made making the site quite easy.

Because of this people find my email address and they email me questions about certain products and ask me if its worth it to buy. I've already made a post on what to look for and the vastness of the products and how they change every year it makes it hard to have single post on each product. Plus many of the products can be used or second-hand so it could be a case-by-case question.

So these people find a way to contact me and ask me these questions of whether or not to buy this product. I can answer these question quite easily with a couple sentences, but the problem is that I don't make any money off of this.

Someone once told me "if you good at something don't do it for free". So I don't know how to charge people or make money off the conversation.

I'm sure no one will pay for a 2 minute answer, but I'm only a few people in the world that could honestly answer the question. Plus I'm not advertising this service but yet people are beating a path to ask these questions.

So how do I make money off these ideas? Do I charge people to answer there question, it could work. I can charge a dollar and save them money.

Or should I create a post where I answer all the questions people ask me and put ads on that page? I bet if I actually advertise this I could have many post that I can create to answer the vastness of the questions and have a way to lead people to my money post.

I'm in a odd position and any feedback is welcomed. Anyone else been in this type of situation where people see you as the expert and seek advice from you and you wonder how you can profit from this?

Is there a possibility you will ever explain how you do your copywriting? I found your earlier case study site, and I noticed the way you are able to use white-spacing. I still can't even come close to achieving the results as you do. It feels like you can say more... but it feels like the site has more white-space. In my case it looks more like a block of text.

I like Magic Online. I've done pretty well and collected quite a lot of cards without paying a cent. I get an idea for a deck that might do well, build it, test it, amend it, test it some more, and if it still doesn't succeed move onto another decks. I've got quite a few decks that do well based on different color combinations.

I also keep an eye out on the decks other players run with - and see if I can pick up any ideas.

I think all these 'gaming skills' are transferable to other areas - and so I reckon your gaming skills/analytics will help you in affiliate marketing.

Only thing with playing an online game though? Quick positive (and negative) feedback. I reckon you have to promise yourself a number of articles on your aff-site and stick to that promise before you decide its a failure. Giving up on sites too soon seems to be prevalent (according to the experts - I'm still a newbie).

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That is really demoralizing, its still miles away from what I do. I tried messing with the css but I just can't get the right mix down. But I guess ill keep playing around

What do you think the typical come and go cycle is for one of these types of sites? For example, there's this one competitor in my niche that I've been seeing around lately for certain keywords I'm targeting. The site is absolute shit but it's got a ton of spammy blog comment backlinks and it's backed by a PBN. From what I can tell it's been around for about a year now. There are a few other competitors that have similar profiles and I always wonder how long they'll last. Any typical timeframe you've noticed over the years for them to implode?

I was exploring various best x search terms and stumbled upon www.beststeammop.reviews. It ranks pretty well for best steam mop & best steam mops. But here's the thing. Although there is a lot of associated steam mop content on this site, there are no product reviews & no 'best' analysis - at all. Yet, it ranks above such worthies as: consumerreports, thesteammopguy, steamercentral, thesteaminsider & thesteamqueen (whose online persona wouldn't win an oscar). These latter websites have reviews and analysis (of admittedly varying quality). How does beststeammop.reviews outrank the lot of them yet totally fail to provide what I am seeking with my SearchTerm?

Using the WayBack website I couldn't find any historic reviews on beststeammop.reviews either. ?!?

Quick Note: I have been debating on if I should do a case study here for some time now. I thought I might do it on Merch, but I am pretty sure most people are sick of me talk about that. I thought about doing it on Merch Informer, but most people here are not running software companies, so I decided to stick with what most people are familiar with, Amazon sites. Half this post was written months ago, half I finished this morning in case it reads weird. Original post here.

A lot of people have been sending me emails and PMs in forums asking me to post a case study. The fact of the matter is that I have been extremely busy with an upcoming software release, as well as focusing on another authority site. Most of my small sites are performing just fine, and a case study on those would be downright boring.

So what to do? I have little time to work on a site, but really could use another income stream. How about a case study creating an authority site in the laziest way possible? What about a six figure exit within 12 months without spending time building links? Now that sounds interesting.

So that is exactly what I am going to do. I will show you over the next 12 months how to create an authority site, and I will do it by some controversial methods. Let’s get into what has been done the first month.

RESEARCHING A NICHE

Here is the thing, with the Google Keyword Planner going to shit, and not wanting to waste time combing through Semrush with a fine tooth comb (works great if you have the time!), I decided to do exactly what I did when I jumped into the internet marketing game. I would find people who were doing well and do an even better job than they were doing.

Over the past 6 or so months, I have been looking to purchase a site. Nothing too expensive, but a good steady earner. I found a niche I really liked and over the course of those 6 months, found a few sites that were in the niche and fit all my criteria.

The first thing you usually do when you find a site to buy is vet it. You want to make sure you get added to the webmaster tools, validate earnings, check backlinks.. ect. Basically go over the entire site and make sure that the business is viable and not going to tank on you right after you purchase it.

In total, I found 3 sites in my niche and were added to the webmaster tools and Analytics for all of them. The deals never did seem to go through. The amazing part though, is to this day I am STILL added to the analytics.

Yep, you read that right. I still have exact Analytics on how my potential competitors are doing 6 months later. This is incredibly valuable.

Not only that, but I was able to know exactly how much these sites were making at the time of selling.

So I had a niche, and I knew the niche makes good money. I also knew that the traffic potential is good and that you do not need too many links if you are writing a lot of long form content. Check mark.

GRABBING A DOMAIN NAME

There is no way I was going to be able to make around $4000 a month within 12 months if I started with a clean domain. I do NOT want to build links or bother with outreach at all. I needed an expired domain. No, I needed an expired domain (s) with killer backlinks!

I have been recommending these guys since 2013, and I still do. If you need an aged domain with backlinks, check out TBSolutions. I got in touch, and was looking through the domains they had. I landed on 3 choices domains, each of which would be a good money site name.

I decided to purchase all 3. This ended up costing me…

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/domain-purchase.png

One of these was an extremely brandable domain with decent links and is ultimately the domain I decided to build the site on. The most expensive domain is in the exact same niche with great authority links from all types of publications. The only reason I did not decide to build the site out here is because the name does not fit well with the type of authority site I am building. The $70 domain I picked up because it had a few niche relevant links and also a good name.

THE APPROACH

The idea here was that I would build out all the content on the brandable domain. When I say content, I mean a LOT of content. This site should grow to multiple millions of words if I stick with it and decide not to sell. Every few hundred thousand words, I would 301 redirect one of the other domains I bought to the money site. This might be grey hat, but it works and it works incredibly well.

Now that we had some domains, we need to get set up on a host and grab some keywords!

SETTING UP HOSTING

I usually recommend Hostgator because they give an amazing affiliate commission and I still have some sites hosted with them. For this case study though, I needed my host to be FAST. My goal was to have a website that loaded in half a second without caching once all set up.

To do this, I know I needed a VPS. If you are anything like me, you might be good at internet marketing but server illiterate. I have created a Digital Ocean before, but what a pain!

I decided to set up an account at CloudWays and give them a shot. They are essentially an in between UI with caching options to help spin server instances even if you really have no idea what you are doing. This is exactly what I needed! Here is a quick image of how it works. The coolest part is that you can pick from different servers from different companies.

https://www.cloudways.com/assets/img/screen-cast-hm2.gif

I actually ended up moving a lot of my lower traffic sites over to CloudWays on a Digital Ocean server. They make it incredibly easy with a plugin that will basically move the WordPress contents over for you.

Anyway, from my tests, I decided to go with Vultr for this authority site. They seem to be faster (not sure why), plus seem to have a bit more reliability. At the time I signed up, they had a 768MB Ram, 15 GB SSD Disk, 1TB Transfer, 1 Core Processor server as the lowest plan and that is what I grabbed for $9 a month. They changed their pricing a little while ago so at the time of writing this the cheapest Vultr server is $11/mo which is VERY worth it for not having the headache of setting up servers yourself and having a support staff to chat to when you need to.

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/server.png

Now that you have your server set up, you just need to point your domain at it and install WordPress. Pointing your domain to CloudWays is a little different than you might be used to, but I promise it is not hard. You can follow this quick article here to do so.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

As I said near the beginning, I do not have very much time to spend on this site. I know I needed some good keywords but I just did not want to take the time to actually look for any.

The best way to quickly mine valuable keywords is simply take them from a site you know is doing well. If a site is doing well but you have better content and better links, you should outrank them. In this case, my site is already starting off with great links, and I will show you how I am getting incredibly good content without writing it myself or going broke.

Once you have identified a site that is doing well and are ready to grab all their keywords, here is how I did it.

For this example, lets use thesweethome.com since this is a site most people are familiar with. All of their URLs are generally the keyword of their articles.

So in this case, I would head to thesweethome.com/sitemap.xml which will bring up the site map for the entire site. It looks a little something like this:

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/sitemap-sweet-home.png

After a little bit of clicking around, we come across their reviews: http://thesweethome.com/post_bc_review.xml and would you look at that! There are all our niche keywords that we know are doing well!

So naturally, I copied and pasted all the URLs from my target sites into an excel spreadsheet. I would make a note of how long each article was.

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/website-word-counter.png

You can do that here: https://wordcounter.net/website-word-count.

I put all of that information in a spread sheet and kept it for later. That is literally all I did for keyword research and it took very little time.

FINDING WRITERS (OUTSOURCING CONTENT CREATION)

I wrote in my original guide to setting up an authority site that I used Upwork and that is still the case. This is a GREAT place to find writers but at the same time can be a massive headache to find the “right” writers who actually care about their work and timelines you set.

What I have found the best is to hire stay at home moms!

Why?

Mothers are responsible, and most importantly seem to pay attention to detail and care about the work they are doing. Seriously, the people I have hired that are stay at home moms have NEVER been late, or if they do have something coming up, they will tell me well in advance. The content is always great and actually researched without just being rewritten from the top of the serps. The best part is that I get the content at a very reasonable rate!

Here is the exact script I used.

I have a quick article writing job if you are interested in getting some 5 star feedback on your profile and potential long term work.

I will provide you with the article title and would like you to research and then write a 1,000 word article.

The content will be affiliate content based around XXX. Those familiar with writing affiliate content will be prioritized.

Required: – Native English – Interested in completing this job quickly for the fixed bid amount and receiving 5 star feedback – Interested in potential longer term writing after the successful completion of this job – Bid at or below the $12 for this article

The right candidate would be available to write 300-500k words for an entire website.

I ended up hiring a lot of people for this job because I wanted to weed out the bad and bring on only a couple of great writers I could count on. This process took about a month, but i the end, I was left with 2 candidates that are still working with me on this project (6 months later!).

SETTING UP WORDPRESS

We have the server set up, we got our keyword research done, and then we found some awesome writers to start writing articles for us. We need a place to publish them. So after you have installed WordPress, set up a theme and some plugins.

I always recommend the Genesis framework. It seems to be coded well, is very fast, responsible, and there are some great child themes you can apply. Ever since buying this one, I never really went with anything else for affiliate sites.

Here are a list of the plugins I have installed on the site

• Akismet Anti-Spam
• Contact Form 7
• Lazy Load
• StatCounter
• Word Stats
• WP Smush
• Yoast SEO

You may notice that there is NO caching plugin. For the time I do not need it, and I do not want it to mess up my link localization at all.

I went ahead and set the rest of WordPress up by changing permalinks, adding in the www to the address and playing around with Yoast so it would do titles properly. At this point, we are finally ready to start adding the content given to us by the writers we found.

ADDING CONTENT, ADDING LOTS OF CONTENT

When you get the articles back from your writers, you are going to want to upload it to your site. Now, for almost all my other sites out there, when I added images, I simply downloaded them on to my computer, and uploaded them to WordPress without a care in the world of big the images were.

Since I signed up with a server with 15 gigs of space and less than a gig of ram, I wanted to make sure I was optimizing this site for its full potential since other than that, I was not going to be working on the site myself at all. If I was going to take the time to upload content, I was going to do it right.

Since this is mostly an Amazon site, that means that every article has 5-15 images. This can REALLY slow down your site if these images are huge (like they most likely are if you are getting them from Amazon).

For every single image I added to my site, I downloaded it to my desktop, opened up Photoshop, went to image size, and changed the dimensions.

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/imagesize.png

I generally changed the HIGHEST dimension to 300 pixels and let it resize based on that. When you go to save the image, I always picked quality 4 which made the images about 20-30KB which is extremely small.

This does not have much affect on the visit in my opinion because I am more concerned on getting them to click on my links than the absolute quality of the images I use. I did this for EVERY article I put on the site, and I guess you could say it is working.

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/website-speed-test.png

Looks setting up that new server was worth it after all!

From here on out, all I will do is upload the articles that the writer gives me. Just so everyone is fully aware, I plan to 301 redirect the best domain I have at 300k words of content.

FAST FORWARD 6 MONTHS

I started writing this post 6 months ago and then put it in draft and got extremely busy with launching and growing my SaaS business Merch Informer. Everything took a bit of a backseat but I still kept uploading articles to this site from the SAME two writers I hired at the beginning. If you were reading this case study and thought the wording was off at times, it is because it was all written at different times so apologies on that.

Amazon Slaps Us In The Face

Keeping it true to form, when a company gets too big, they usually demolish the people that helped them get there. There is nothing much you can do about it besides change out your affiliate links for other programs. Amazon lowered fees for associates all across the board and gave us all a WEEK of warning essentially cutting my income 40% overnight from my Amazon sites.

I thought long and hard about finishing this case study at all. Should I sell all my Amazon sites and finally get away from it while I move into the software space? Should I double down and buy Amazon affiliate sites at a great discount? After all, what makes a site valuable is not always the earnings, but the traffic. If you have traffic you can make money, you just have to figure out how the best way to do it is. Some people will look at this and think I spent a decent chunk on content if they do not built large sites. To some extent this is true, but I decided to finish the case study because everyone out there building sites is currently stuck in the same shitty situation.

Site Stats

In total, I have uploaded anywhere between 40-100k words of content to this site every single month without fail since I started. Just like I said I was going to do, I 301 redirected the other domain at 300k words of content.

This should be the month that I cross a half million words of content on the site, and this is where we sit today.

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/word-count.png

The traffic graph is going in the right direction!

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/traffic-graph.png

Let’s take a look at some of those sweet hands off earnings!

http://www.passive.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/authority-site-5-month-update.jpg

I was expecting to see around $1600-$2000 this month, but with Amazon changing everything, we shall see how I do!

WRAPPING IT UP

I will not be updating this case study every month but I will try to post an update when I have time as I am going forward with the content creation. The simple reason why I cannot keep the updates coming is that besides running MI, we have been working on a new piece of software for affiliate marketers that has NEVER been done and I am pretty excited about it.

Until next time (ignoring all PMs)!

You know, that paragraph made me think of all the possibilities to package this specific type of automation. A smart marketer could surely find a way to sell it to the masses.

Basically IFTT but marketed for a specific purpose.

I pretty much do this too, and it's time consuming AF. Am I missing something here? Is there there a faster way of resizing/compressing images?

What the fuck....

Makes me wonder how else I'm wasting my life away. Sigh.

And almost everything has been done before so if you want to automate something, just use google ("how to resize a lot of pictures in photoshop"). And if you can't find how to do it with google, I highly recommend Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

*

You get ripped by shedding fat, my personal favorites for that purpose are fork put downs and table pushaways.

You get better at writing by writing. Do you get better lifting weights by reading fitness magazines?

http://media.makeadare.com/img/5517b2778/image_b16cb58c67.jpg

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Trying to learn a bit more about domain values, etc. and their marketing potential when done right.

I've recently spent a few thousand dollars on a project I'm working on.

The domain name is an exact match domain name for a nootropic supplement that gets over 60,000 searches for the exact keyword, per month.

I plan on building an informational website around the domain name, with an affiliate link or two for purchase of the supplement.

Obviously my plan is to get on the first page of Google as soon as possible. I don't know how long this would take, but I'd assume with an Exact Match Domain name it shouldn't be TOO difficult?

Once that happens, I'd think I could get at least a few tens of thousands per clicks per month, given the high search volume for the keyword. From this I'd expect at least a few hundred conversions per month, raking me in a few grand per month if done right.

Are my expectations realistic? I do have some experience in this but I am young and this is the largest scale I've worked on so far.

I'm looking into creating an online insurance referral site where people can type in their zip code and get offered quotes. Can someone point me in the right direction, I don't need your website but I'd like to know how to create one etc...

I stumbled upon this site (not mine and I'm not promoting it either) http://www.hedgeanalyst.com/ and I used these sites to get my own insurance quote. It can't be $400 per referral as these are probably based on 7 day EPC @ $75 or so.

Not sure what the issue is here. I'm using EasyAzon (yes some hate it here) and I design my own buttons, images etc. You just change the image link and image dimensions and you still get the geo-targeting.

When I use the product images I'll make sure to add a "sticker": buy on Amazon.

I'm happy to login and manage it if you want 😉

OH heeeyyyyy look who it is.

Jk hope you're doing well. No opinion on the plugin. Couldn't care less.

Why thank you sir! I'm definitely stoked on knowing it now, CSS has allowed me to create some pretty awesome designs.

Good to know about the API, I'll probably end up steering clear of it then. SO much more shit I could be doing than that lol.

Hmm, didn't know the plugins were limiting in style customization since I've never used them. In that case, I'd say there is definitely a void you could fill there. It's clear people don't want to take the time to learn CSS, but if what you say about the API is true, they definitely won't want to learn that either, meaning there's two serious places you can add value - easy customization and real-time info. Double whammy!

Have you ever used Social Warfare? It's a social sharing plugin that makes customizing social buttons super easy. They've got a killer back-end dashboard; really user-friendly, simple button switches and dropdown options, etc. I could see a dashboard like that doing super well in this link plugin scenario. Some quick screenshots in case you've never used it: Shot 1, Shot 2, Shot 3

Welcome back!

A plugin might be a bit excessive but how about a post which provides some guidance on how to better structure and improve the UI of pages with some examples (I.e.simple CSS around products). Although people really should be able to Google what big affiliate are doing and take some inspiration from there.

I've been building my own AA linking plugin for a month or so now and will likely release it within a week.

I largely did so so that I could make my own templates that don't look like shit, and offer flexibility - for example, have two CTA buttons on the same page with different color options.

As well as offering geo-targeting and a few other neat features I haven't seen in any other plugins.

Would it be bad taste to post here when it's up on WordPress.org? I'm going to release it completely for free, no plans for monetizing it at this point.

My only problem with these plugins is that they do not offer geo-targeting in the links - that's my biggest problem and why I still use geni.us links.

I get an extra $400 a month or so from the geo-targeting. While it might not be a lot for some people it makes a difference as the site scales up.

Is that something that can be done?

I didn't know this was an issue. I find text links in the content work the best for most of my sites.

How's your case study site doing?

Set up a git repo and let's collaborate.

Experimenting with my website over the past year has given me a world of knowledge on HTML and CSS that I never thought I'd be capable of. It's incredible how a few simple commands can turn an element from bare bones and basic to Margot Robbie beautiful (ugh, please marry me)

With that said, I feel this is another typical barrier to entry, no different than learning to research keywords or any of the other semi-difficult practices we do on the daily. Could people use a solution to it? Of course. Creating a table is one of the easiest elements on the PLANET, but look how popular Tablepress is. But could people develop the skills on their own with a few weeks of reading and a little bit of trial and error? Also yes. There are shit tons of guides out there on HTML and CSS that can literally take a person from zero coding knowledge to professional web designer. The difference between those who learn and those who don't is purely motivation to do so.

IMO the beauty of those plugins comes from the fact that they offer real-time pricing and other info through the API. I haven't really cared to sit down and learn how to implement the API through my buttons (yet), so I'm not sure whether it's difficult or not, but that feature has always been the value to me of those Amazon link plugins. Seems like that would be more difficult.

I would love to see what you come up with if you do move ahead with this. HumbleAmazon, I like it.

• https://www.lifewire.com/best-smartphones-4043781
• http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-action-camera/
• https://thesurvivallife.com/best-pistol-light.html

(links for those on mobile)

Just wondering, I've spent the last year managing many aspects of a retail shop this past year, mainly focusing on all things ecommerce. We've had some pretty drastic changes and growth since I've started and it's been a fantastic experience.

Australia seems to be lacking in a lot of resources pertaining to us, which can make things difficult when you start looking at selling physical items. I'd like to gather all the resources and information I've discovered and make it available for people now that I think online commerce is becoming a more viable option for small businesses.

I'm considering starting a blog as a resource with everything I've learned in this and my previous roles. Everything from packaging, order fulfilment, pricing and touching on basic software development and automation (I've built several succesful websites and iOS apps in the past). It would be as much about me providing what I've learnt as it would be about discovering what I can be doing a lot better. But I'd like to try and gauge what kind of interest something like this would have.

If anyone has any opinions or even questions(!) that'd be swell.

Edit: thanks for all the feedback guys. I will get to work and for the people who asked I will certainly keep you updated.

Hi,

I'm putting together a site for a friend's business and I'm having some trouble getting it to rank on google.

The address is http://www.samuelthomasconstruction.com.au/

We can't afford to hire an SEO specialist so I've tried my best to get it up to standards but I think I'm a bit lost in it all. Its wordpress based and I've installed an SEO and caching plugins to help out. I've also added the business to google maps in the hopes of improving local search results.

One obvious factor is missing content i.e. the About Us section. Are there any other glaring things that I'm missing?

The terms I would be targeting are "Newcastle builders" or "Newcastle construction".

Apologies if this is too vague and thanks in advance for any advice!

I am teaching an entrepreneur class this spring. It is an experiential class with lots of flexibility. What do you think are the most important things for young entrepreneurs to know?

We start with the idea, play monopoly to lose (in order to develop strategic thinking and comfort with loss -- when you are an entrepreneur, sometimes you are going to make mistakes or even fail.) We learn about influence, sales, marketing, knowing our numbers and how to best utilize our support groups or employees.

Do you have any exercises or ideas to spark entrepreneurial thinking?

It has been a tough time for me. I was a android+game+web developer for ~4 years, before I gave up like 7 months ago. Nothing seemed to work.

You know in indie software development we have a thing called programming burn out. Which is basically when you pour your heart and soul into something, work on a product, an app or website or game, for months, day and night and then it doesn't work out. That's what I've been living for for the past few months.

I did have a semi decent blog, got like 700 sessions a day. Then I found this sub and saw that people are making ~$100-200 from like 200 sessions a day. I felt that that couldn't possibly be right.

Then I started looking...

• My niche has some pretty expensive products.
• And it's a pretty wide range of products. I doubt there's anything less than $50, but it goes up to around $2-3k.
• My readers/fans fucking love me.
• And they really are looking to buy on topic stuff
• I genuinely want to help people by sharing my knowledge and I have proven so by maintaining a blog for ~3 years with no ads/paywalls/no monetization whatsoever.

Also...

• I'm a developer.
• I already know SEO/setting up native responsive websites on my own server/SSL : All this stuff that I am already doing, but not for making money.

So I thought: Fuck it. Let's give it a shot. Just yesterday, I put ONE amazon affiliate link in one old insignificant blog post (it got like 5 visitors yesterday, way less than my most popular posts).

And motherfuck I got 4.68$ today.

I don't fucking believe it. You magnificent fuckers. I think I am now feeling positive for the first time in years. Even if this was an exceptional occurrence, I now think that earning ~$1000/month is not even so far fetched, maybe even more if I really do this. This would be like 5 times more than I ever got with my 5 android, 3 ios apps and 3 games and 2 other websites combined in 4 years.

Thank you to all of you.

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Hey everyone,

Quick question: Is it possible (or even ethical) for me to use photos from other websites if they're heavily edited? It's tough to find decent pictures relevant to my niche.

I'm not referring to product photos, just generic images (almost like stock photos) for the sake of having sleek featured images for my posts.

Let's say I use an image from another website, throw a blur on it, a color gradient, and then some text.

Could the other website take any action against me if they find I edited their image and used it without permission?

I don't spend a lot of time on this, I'm much more worried about the copy itself. However, I'm not too bad at graphic design and I like to add some extra polish on my website where it's appropriate.

Thanks in advance for the help.

If it's from the manufacturer of the product then they will hardly care since you are promoting their product.

But what if for example you're reviewing their product and give it a terrible review and a (deserved) 1-star rating, will they be inclined to take action then? Because in those cases you're not really promoting them, quite the opposite. Or do they simply not care about it?

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I've met some really stupid people who have made a killing back in the late 90s, boggles my mind. Then again, 500k for some people is the world, maybe they're overstating.

I've always wondered how old you are btw, I know you're a private person so I won't ask. I'm putting you between 30 and 45 :)

PS: Fucking Steve...

Out of curiosity.

How important would you say is it to compile a list of keyword for your niche? Is it merely a tool to come up with ideas for content? What if I already have those idea, would focusing on coming up be worthwhile.

Personally, I don't have a list of keywords and I don't really care about them. I just brainstorm article ideas and get to know my niche in order to come up with new topics for my site.

The average blow

Took me a second lol

Googles keyword finder generally only shows the obvious ones

Tell me about it, Google prompts autocorrect for my main main keyword every time. They don't know anything, it's a pretty nice niche though.

You think 30-50 years down the road what we are doing right now will be considered "easy money" because ranking new sites on old topics will be 10x more difficult?

I feel like the internet is a look in the past, when things were more simple (not necessarily making money) less restricted, still a bit messy etc.

You obviously have heaps of experience, but ranking a website in 250 hours of work and selling it for 90+ within half a year reminds me of tales of the .com boom and how easy it was to invest profitably.

Then again, there will always be new opportunities. Maybe not as accessible though...

sitting on my holo-toilet pooping out panda and lobster flavored nutrient paste

Colorful.

I wouldn't pay for a guest post unless it's from a huge authority, I mean HUGE (and those kind of sites don't sell guest posts, correct me if I'm wrong)

Why pay for something you can get for free? That's how I am approaching this. Like others have said, it's a numbers game. If my content is on point, I shouldn't have problems securing guest posts.

I would much rather be critiqued on the quality of my site and guest post rather than the depth of my pockets. Any spammer can pay $ to have his links featured on the seller's site. I don't want to be associated with either of them.

Humble,

I agree with you 100%. I've read so many forums and blogs where they instruct readers to avoid any keywords that possess major retailers within the top ten. But if you do some research, you'll see plenty of small niche sites that have outranked them through simple SEO.

One thing I wanted to ask you was regarding suggested bids in the keyword planner. Is that even a factor when you conduct your keyword research?

Hi everybody,

This is my second submission on Reddit where I will continue my Affiliate Marketing experiment started here: http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/39x0hg/do_not_know_how_to_earn_money_online_lets_learn/ . Firstly, I wanna thank all those people who left comments both on my website and Reddit, it's very important for me. Secondly, I am very happy to read people advices in my email. And finally, thank YOU for reading this post right now :)

I just finished writing my new post about niche choosing (http://ragin.io/choosing-a-niche/). I think it's obvious that it's one of the most important things for building AM website (or even the most important). The purpose of this post is to help beginners not to make some really stupid mistakes of which they may think that AF is total bullshit. No, it's not. And I am going to prove it :)

I am very happy to receive all your comments, advices, suggestion. Feel free to write me and ask questions!

Take care.

Alex Ragin

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What is this?

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I'm sorry but I have no faith you will succeed at this point.

You list FOUR WHOLE SOURCES (and not very good ones at that) that you used to research. IS this what equates to research these days. You didn't even try.

Source 1: Dated information at best.

Source 2: IS AN AFFILIATE WEBSITE THAT MAKES MONEY FROM GIVING BAD ADVICE

Source 3: Speculative advice at best

Source 4: Oh come on now, this was your last post. And the advice was from me. Are you serious?

Next lets break down your take aways..

1. High demand. Contradicts your next point.
2. Low competition.

These niches DONT exist.

You have to have a compromise, choose a smaller niche of a popular item. Lets say "fridges" is the popular item. A smaller niche would be "fridges with doors that have the freezer int he bottom" Guess what? That smaller niche is not in high demand but the competition is low.

3.Good income.

Most of the marketers believe that it’s better to sell products with min price of 100-150$, otherwise you won’t be able to get profit at all

Wrong. Wrong. WRONG.

You are talking about amazon here. It works on a tiered payout structure where the more items you sell the higher your share (expressed as a percentage) of the sale. You can see it here:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/compensation.html

Lets say you sell 6 x $100 items. That gives you $40. (based on the 4% payout for this number of items sold). Not bad.

BUT

If you were to sell those same 6 X$100 and 25 x cheap items your pay out would be $65 (+ the commission on the cheaper items) for next to no work at all.

Yes, its nice to sell expensive items but in reality consumers are more likely to spend a lot of time researching these and be very mindful about dropping their money. On the other hand, cheap items are bought without a second thought (coffee anyone?) and not only add to your total sales but vastly jump your payout as well.

Expensive items SUPPLEMENTED with cheap items and accessories related to your niche works best!

4.EASY TO SELL.

that means you have to give all the needed information on your website, not to let potential client think much on the partner shop.

Strike 4. You only want your visitor to click through to amazon. Amazon is amazing at converting and will retarget old items that the visitor looks at from months ago. You want the customer to buy ANYTHING. not just something from your niche. You will expect that between 40-70% of items sold on amazon will NOT be related to your niche.

5.Personal Desire. The only half right answer you came up with.

Seriously, if this is the effort you came up with then anyone following along with this ridealong will learn NOTHING BUT MISINFORMATION. And that is dangerous.

Below I will paste a post I wrote late last year on choosing a niche. Feel free to alter it, paste it, claim it as your own. Lots of other people have.

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Here's a new blog post I wrote. Let me know what you think.

http://www.lucidwebgroup.com/blog/why-your-content-marketing-strategy-will-fail-and-how-to-prevent-that-from-happening

Edit: I've got more than enough interest from people that didn't want to whine about me destroying their business. Closing this up for the time being.

"Adding value" is a great catch-phrase for modern content marketers, but so often I see people saying it and not really doing it. As I said to someone the other day - writing a whole bunch of content doesn't make you an expert, you might just be a verbose idiot.

The real challenge I see in the general contentopshere at the moment is that it's hard to filter through the noise for the GOOD, authoritative content. IMO Google has really failed at this, and the Twitter culture of "share interesting links" has made it even worse.

We're living in the world of the 10-hour guru, where everyone thinks they have something worth sharing, where people have been told "You don't have to be an expert to sell yourself as one". It's all quantity over quality, and people fool themselves into thinking that the post they share is really insightful and useful.

Anyway, that's my rant on value for the day.

Thought the article was kind of a fun read, particularly because I do have a really unique kids product I sell (for those that don't know me in this sub), and I have been approached by mommy bloggers who want me to pay them or send them free product in exchange for shoutouts. I've received those "media kit with embellished stats" and then you go check out their social accounts and they get like 14 likes per photo on instagram.

On the flip side, I've also been doing that growth experiment with my dog, so I'm going to be coming from the other end pretty soon (we're just getting free stuff sent to us in the last month or so), and some of those things to watch out for (as an influencer) are a bit interesting.

Particularly, points that stand out:

Give-away users have really low engagement

I already assumed this, and obviously I'm not a mommy blogger, but I wonder if this would be different for my kids product - if I give away a unique product and people give me their details to win that unique product, that tells me they want me unique product. I imagine the conversion rate for those users will be higher than someone who wants a mixer from a mommy blogger.

Brand Agreements & Legal Issues

This is interesting - perhaps this is a market gap that an influencer agency could fill by providing some kind of coverage as part of the service. I hadn't even considered legal ramifications of doing something like that. It's a bit of a "duh" moment for me.

Wantrepreneur Economy

I actually think there's a big discussion to be had around industries that exist to sell to wantrepreneurs. It just starts to become one giant circle jerk.

Anyone know where her primary brand home is? Seems like theamericanmama and josidenise across FB/Insta/Twitter only have a max of about 20k followers. That hardly seems sufficient to be flown around the place as per her post.

Generally in agreement with you. I still feel like there's a problem waiting to be solved around expert content discovery... I feel like it'd be awesome to have a single site where each business/startup/marketing topic gets 5 experts on that topic writing the ultimate step-by-step how-to. You hit the front page, hit the category you want (eg, Facebook) and click the topic you want (eg, ad strategy) and end up with a segmented break-down of each sub-topic on how to achieve mastery of that area.

Like, can you imagine if we had a site like The Landing Page Course but for every topic in marketing/business/startup? Particularly if it was crowd-audited a bit, with suggestions for updates and changes to keep it truly evergreen.

Unfortunately I cannot reveal examples I have personally worked on

I really wish you would/could. I was looking forward to the unveiling following last year's affiliate case study but then you sold it.

You have no idea how liberating it is to be able to give real examples from your own work when you talk about strategies.

Brian Deans Backlinko as an example

Looks good, I'll have to read through it.

His site reminds me of this idea I have that authority blogs should be split into "cateogries" and "blog". I did an experiment a few years back with writing blog content in the enterprise consulting space i work in and ended up with FIMSpecialist.com. I never really finished it, but the basic idea was that evergreen content (how-tos, guides, general information) is a 'page' (in wordpress terms) and that news, updates, events, and 'situational' stuff (eg, I had issue with this error or "I want to rant about X") goes in the blog.

Any thoughts on that format?

That site is actually somewhat interesting. It really was an experiment (which is why there are menu links that go nowhere), and I stopped after I hit some of the goals I had for it. Anyway, no updates since 2013 and the traffic has barely dropped - not huge traffic, but good for a low-demand niche (and how awesome is that weekly seasonality? Corporates only Google "FIM" Mon-Fri and not at all over Christmas). I still get people after 3 years writing comments thanking me for a particular article, which is cool.

And it's really because the official Microsoft documentation is sub-par to the point of being wrong, and consultants working in my space aren't taking time to write good content. They're hoarding their knowledge and don't see the value of being seen as the authority on the topic. I've actually been considering starting it up again lately - even had a company selling 3rd party components reach out offering to sponsor the blog if I updated it regularly.

But the overhead to create content that I think adds value is so high, particularly in that space... and it's not something that particularly interests me. Honestly, I'd rather write an article about how I'm monetising my dog.

Once upon a time I would have agreed with this theory, but thanks to just how easy it is to share competitions through social media, you will get a whole bunch of people that just want a free product, they don't care what it is.

That's disappointing. I can't wait to test it though - it's really frustrating, but I've had to hit pause on marketing (which is why my web/social presence sucks so hard) until I solve some manufacturing issues. One fun quirk though was that when FB introduced "on this day" last year, it made two of my previous viral campaigns go viral AGAIN, 2 years after they were initally posted. Right before Christmas. Couldn't ask for more when marketing a kid's product. I can't wait to crank up some of my other intiatives with this, but yeah... physical products can be a nightmare if you don't get your supply chain perfect early on.

Awesome product by the way!

Cheers! It was my "kickstarter experiment". Learnt so much. Can't wait to do the next one.

http://josidenise.com/dear-mommy-blogger/ Just seen it on an news site, I thought it could be an interesting view for people here

I was going to delete this post until I actually read it and the rant is 100% spot on and explains the bullshit entitlement of all the mommy bloggers I have ever dealt with (which is way to god damn many).

Yes true but....

I just enjoyed a mother talking shit about mommy bloggers. Priceless.

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So like my title says, I started a website a few months ago, but had to stop to earn an income at the time, and looking to get back to my website now.

I have no idea where to actually start though. I have my topic picked (obviously) and a few short reviews on the website, and get maybe 30 views per month average.

It is a website that reviews camping gear, but I have only gotten around to a couple tents so far.

I am having trouble finding good keywords that get a lot of searches per month that are easy to rank for, and be easy to fit those keywords into the reviews naturally.

Can someone help me out by providing a few keywords to start with, or the best websites to do the research to find great keywords?

I'd like to eventually cover all camping gear, but will probably stick with just tents for now, as that is the main thing people seem to look for, and it is what I have already started with.

Thanks in advance for any help any of you can provide.

Does anyone have any podcasts they regularly listen to that are related to this field ? I use to listen to the Spencer Haws episodes but haven't done so recently. I often felt a strong suggestion to buy LTP was involved. In saying that there were some good things I picked up along the way.

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I'm currently working on a site that is not yet live, but something I've been worrying about is not having the price of items listed anywhere. Unlike your site, my site does not focus on quirky, weird, etc. type items that people will click on whether there is a price or not so your answer may not be relevant to me, but I'd like to hear your opinion anyway.

I know Amazon has rules about putting prices on your affiliate items, and I'm actually not sure how sites like TIWIB and SUTMM get away with listing prices that are not up to date.

So what I'm wondering is do you think it's a problem not having prices listed? Is it something you've gotten complaints about?

Also, I like your search bar. Is it a plugin?

So what are your earnings? I wouldn't ask or listen to anyone's advice in this field without knowing that first.

As someone who once had this mentality, let me tell you now that you need a mindset change. This is in no way meant to offend you but rather to help you.

There's a reason successful people are highly regarded for their financial freedom. You rarely hear about the struggles of anyone successful, be it in the media or otherwise. Why? Because who the heck has time for a feel good story. People want the glitz and glamour. They see this and immediately proceed to do two things:

• hate on the person
• assume they can achieve similar success with ease

I can tell you from experience (I am growing my own brand on Amazon) that I've seen tons of folks like you. I'm in a few Facebook groups and the mentality is the same. If I make a post that provides excellent value, I get probably 10 likes and comments. Some cool person makes a post with a screenshot for their earnings and they get 100000 likes and comments. I'm not usually one to speculate but I'd bet my entire business that 90% of those commenting will be in the same position they're in a year from now. Even though those same folks are supposedly trying to "build" their Amazon businesses too.

And finally, if there is one thing you take from this long reply, it should be this:

If myself, u/humblesalesman, u/drunkmall or anyone else needs to indulge you by revealing every intricate detail about our business, then you had better be:

• our billionaire investor
• close family member (see: wife, child, parent)
• or a shareholder

Failing all three of those, telling you we make $100 a second or $100 a year, does not help you in anyway. There is no logical argument you can make as to how it adds value to what you need to do for your own life and business. If someone with experience chooses to share their wisdom, you can either listen or move on. Life's too short to have a pissing contest about numbers my friend.

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If you don't mind me asking, (and this is a really simplified way of asking it, I know) how did you "get" your 20,000 subscribers? Was it because your books already had a large following, or are you offering exclusive content in your newsletters?

There is bound to be some popular youtube channels centered around e-cigs, I would contact them and see if they would be interested in some free juice for a shout out in a video.

Modified some Wordpress/theme files for desired functionality (e.g. edited Wordpress' post.php file so the post displays the last date updated instead of the date published; this way I can edit them and have it look more recent to the user)

Did you have to do that through PHP syntax? Or is there a feature in the dashboard to do that? I've been trying to figure out how to do this but no luck atm

Great post by the way, I'm in the process of building my site so it'll be cool to see how yours plays out alongside mine. Best of luck this month

Yes, I feel like I'm on the right path, but, I feel like I should not focus too much effort on the old site at this point. I had decided after the last case study post to start a second site and just add stuff here and there to the original site just to keep my Amazon commission % higher since I was at least selling some items.

I will surely try to improve at least that post to try to maximize the sales. Especially since it pays 12% commission. The problem is that the cost of the items is so low. I would really need to be converting well and have much much higher traffic coming to see some real money.

Randomly, I was looking at one of my main competitors and noticed that he started selling an affiliate marketing course that he was linking to through his niche site. So I took the plunge to check it out since it was only $10 for a few hours of video.

It was nothing that I could use but what I found interesting is that he says he was making 2,000 a month after a year of working on the site. While that amount is nothing to sniff at, there is no way I am putting that kind of effort into improving my site to make that. My time will be better spent using what I know now and testing on a new site with items that are close to $200 instead of $15.

On a side note, do you know any sites you could point me to that have a good Amazon funnel in the post or a good CTA? I'd love to see an example of what you think works.

Part 1

Part 2

I’m a little over due on writing my case study for my recent work on my affiliate sites. I wish it was because of how much work I was doing on those sites, but it really because my life is completely chaotic right now. (In case anybody is wondering about what happened with that client I got which you can read about here, I spent tons of time trying to get work done for him. I finally pulled the plug since it was going nowhere. I wasted all that time when I should have been working on my sites.)

Anyway, without getting into that let me just start the updates on my progress so far.

At the end of the last update I was getting my original set more or less set up. I have really treated this site as an experiment. Not sure how much money it was going to make, I decided I was just going to try things out and see what happens.

It was slowly but steadily climbing traffic-wise. So, it started with around 0-5 views a day in January to now doing about 100-150 views a day.

I got rid of the affiliate banners in my side bar and kept a few in the content of the posts. I added some adsense to it and actually saw some revenue coming in from that. About $10 a month or so.

I hardly wrote any content. I was so busy trying to market the site and do outreach that it didn’t leave me much time to write. I did write a few new posts in March and April, though.

But outreach had almost zero effect. Most times I was not even getting a response. Most of it was my approach. My e-mails were terrible. It was obvious that I was just trying to get some links since I didn’t have anything concrete to offer.

As time went on, I realized my site was getting more and more cluttered and seemed really just too salesy. It oozed the fact that I was trying everything I could to get you to open the wallet. So, I got rid of adwords (which was also to see if it would affect my Click Thru Rate for Amazon. It didn’t. It stayed the same) and left just a few banners from some of my other affiliate networks. And reduced the number of affiliate links.

I changed the theme and made it look a lot cleaner.

Ok, so for Traffic and revenue. In March I had 4,292 views and made a little over $100. About $70 from Amazon, a little over $30 from Linkshare and $10 from Adsense. I had 67 sales on Amazon, so you can see just how low the commissions are on my products. I did get lucky and have somebody buy a bunch of office products that got me around $30. That was a nice bump. But, not too many people bought anything besides what I was promoting.

1,000 of those views was from a Reddit post, however. Not organic and didn’t result in a single sale on Amazon. Literally not one. So, I wasn’t even angry when a mod pulled my post even though I had about 25 comments on it, and it was in the top 5 hot posts for the day. I asked him why and he said it was such an obvious How To, that it was insulting. I didn’t even bother to argue that if it was that obvious then why were people responding so positively to it? Anyway, it made me realize for sure that people really don’t spend on Reddit.

April saw a dip in traffic but I also didn’t post at all on Reddit. 2,309 views and roughly $75 in revenue between Amazon and Linkshare. This time Linkshare was about $45 and Amazon about $25. No Adense since I removed it by this point.

This month gets a bit interesting. I’m averaging 105 views a day. About half come from Pinterest for one post and the rest are from Google. My most popular post is ranked #1 for many of the keywords I was trying to rank for. It’s linked to my Linkshare affiliate and I make pretty good sales for that strictly from there. No Amazon links on that page. It even ranks above the actual products own website.

I wrote a post about 3 weeks ago that I’m already seeing traffic to it since one of the keywords is ranked #3. A few other posts have made it finally onto the first page on Google. So far I have about 4 posts that are ranked in the top 5 on Google for many of my target keywords.

So what are my sales for this month with all that happening? $5.25 so far. I’m getting roughly the same amount of clicks to Amazon and Linkshare that I got in March and April but for some reason nobody is converting this month. No idea why.

In the meantime I started another niche site, which was going slowly since as I mentioned I was involved with a client. I think I hit on a good one since this time I did my due diligence. Somebody asked me in one of my other case studies about my workflow. Here’s a basic outline of how I approached it this time.

I saw somebody with the product and so checked it out on Amazon and found it’s a best seller in its category. I went through the reviews and forums related to the niche and wrote down a bunch of potential article ideas and some keywords. Then I plugged them into adwords to see what people were searching for and saved the csv to Google Sheets. I went through each of the keywords and ran them through the various keyword aggregators like ubersuggest, soovle, and the keyword shitter (actual name).

I checked out the competition with Semrush and looked at their backlinks, and then tried to surmise if it would be easy to get some links from those sites with some of my article ideas that I planned to write. Looking at some of the sites, I actually came up with some other article ideas.

In a Google Spreadsheet, I list each article with the keywords I hope to target and the searches volume of each so when i write out the article I can make sure I sprinkle them into the post.

So far I only have 2 posts since the keyword research took me weeks since I was busy on the project that went no where. But, I am back on track with it now and feel like I can finally get cracking on it.

Sorry for the incredibly long winded post! But I wanted to be thorough so people could see how detailed things can get when doing this.

Well, the only response that I have for you is that you're right. Some few weeks later after stepping back and looking at the whole picture and realizing..you are right. I was rude because I felt attacked, which I was. But I shouldn't have even gotten upset since you got straight to the point with no sugar coating. I am leaving this post up in hopes that other people don't make the same mistake. I hope your home brewed coffee tasted a little better knowing my misfortune is glaringly obvious to me now. Also I am sure that pinky finger being thrust into the air probably made it taste better ;)

Which sales site are you using? FEInternational? I heard they are extremely good and I also like their service.(f.ex.: Thomas Smale is a member of the BUSO forum and openly response to any questions.)

Hey guys,

New to this subreddit, but I recently sold a very small affiliate site a couple months back for about $2,000 and wanted to share my experience.

Although the sale wasn't HUGE, the process was very illuminating and interesting for future projects. It also reinforced that I should be focusing my efforts on higher leverage options. However, if you're new to entrepreneurship or online marketing, hopefully you find this helpful.

Let me know if you have any questions.

The other day I sold a passive income site I built 2 years ago for $1,830.40 with Empire Flippers.

Here’s an in-depth look at how I went and sold my first website ever (and what I thought of the whole process).

The Background

A couple years back, I started a new web site (to protect the buyer’s privacy, let’s call it GWP.com). It was in the WordPress themes space.

I had seen some success from other sites in the space and knew there was opportunity.

I built the site quickly with the help of an AWESOME virtual assistant, but then had other projects come up that were more important.

The site did well from the get-go because of my initial enthusiasm, but it wasn’t a game-changer for me. It made a few sales a month (off which I made about $30), but I did basically no work on it and it was very under-optimized. It was THE definition of a passive income site.

That said, even if I optimized it, I think I could double or triple the earnings, but probably not enough to make it worth directing a lot of attention to it.

The site was was making about $100/month, which for some people is great, but I had a lot of other areas in general that I could optimize that have greater returns (this site, for one).

In addition to revenue reasons, over the last year, I’ve been working on focus, and I’ve made the decision that I don’t really want to be spending time on anything that isn’t Impossible or Paleo related.

For that reason, this site no longer fit in with my goals and I decided to sell it.

Picking Empire Flippers

I used EmpireFlippers.com, who I know through the Dynamite Circle.

Before listing, I had never met them, but they’ve got a good reputation and a decent buying audience, so I decided to give it a shot.

I know several guys who have bought and sold sites through them. Also, because it wasn’t a HUGE dollar amount, I figured I would give it a try.

The Fees

Empire Flippers charges $297 to list a site for a first time seller. They charge $97 for any future sites.

That’s not a bad deal, especially on bigger sites (most brokers work on a percentage), but if you’re selling a small site (like I did), the fee actually cuts into your profit by a large number since it’s not a scaled percentage.

Either way, I decided the listing fee was worth it and went full-speed ahead (Note: I found out about another “commission” fee later on in the process. More on that later).

The Experience

The experience started off a bit bumpy. I did an analysis on the numbers and had to separate them out since these sites shared a few affiliate accounts I used for other projects.

This is a good lesson for the future: create separate affiliate accounts for each site if you intend to sell them in the future.

That said, I ran the numbers and provided a detailed breakdown in the spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough.

They wanted a login directly to my affiliate account so they could verify the numbers themselves. This is understandable, but a little invasive if you have multiple sites running through the same account. Also, it would have been a much less of a big deal if they would have gotten the numbers right.

Even after providing the numbers (on my end), the numbers they came up with were way off.

In less words – for this sale specifically – ShareASale (the affiliate marketplace that I used for affiliate links) provides the total transaction amount AND the commission you actually make.

The Empire Flippers VAs added these two numbers together instead of just counting the commission.

This meant that for each sale I “made” through ShareASale, Empire was counting my total revenue on the site as 130% of the purchase price – even though I was only making 30% of the purchase price!

Because of this, the initial estimate I got for the site was close to $8k!

While I could have taken their valuation and kept the listing price at that, I have this darn conscience that would have bothered me for a while about it.

I pointed out the error to the team and they re-ran the numbers and agreed to list the website at $1830.40 or about 20x monthly revenue.

Here were the exact calculations:

I gave them a login to my site, Google analytics, and ShareASale, and they approved my listing.

The Multiple

They approved the site for a 20x multiple. I pushed for a higher multiple, but they reminded me I was looking for a quick sale, so I agreed to go with 20x.

The Sale

The sale went up 1 day and was sold within 24 hours.

That was fast!

In fact, I went back to look and it sold just over 8 hours after it was listed.

Getting it sold FAST was awesome, but it also reinforced my opinion that the listing price was too low. That said, I didn’t cry too much because again, my goal was on selling it fast rather than maximizing a few hundred bucks off it.

I figured if I got the sale over and the cash quick, then it all would be good.

The only other thing that bothered me about the listing was that I never got to see it before it went live. As a marketer, I would have liked to have been involved in the listing name, language, etc.

I guess that’s part of their process (and maybe a benefit to people who don’t want to have to deal with it), but it bothered me a bit after the fact (although that could just be because of my inner control freak tendencies).

Again, these were all minor things – I wanted to focus on my other projects – and the fact that they could get a buyer in less than 24 hours was impressive.

The Migration Process

Migration is where I had my biggest issues with the process..

First, I had to provide access to the Filipino techs to transfer my site.

That’s okay, but I had other projects on the same host and it’s a bit nerve-wracking to give someone you’ve never met wholesale access to your hosting backend.

The migration process took a bit (as they had to coordinate buyer and seller info), so I think this part took a few days.

The other annoying thing was that as part of the migration, they had to verify and change what sorts of ad info and affiliate info you had.

In my opinion, this should be solely on the part of the buyer. The seller sells the site as-is and the buyer should have to do the work to swap out ads.

Empire Flippers tries to mitigate this by having their techs do it – but the end result is that it slows everything down for the seller.

The other annoying piece was that I kept getting comments and questions that should have never come up

• “This link doesn’t work”
• “What banners perform best?”

These are good questions, but should have been figured out when the buyer was purchasing the site or did their due diligence – not after the sale has been entered into agreement.

As for links that don’t work – they didn’t work when I sold the site and that’s part of the buyer’s opportunity. The site was under-optimized from the get-go and I hadn’t spent anytime looking at it. Changing that link is the reason you get it for 20x vs. 36x.

Also, throughout the process, the migration ticket is handled on 1 ticket for both parties. That means each party can see what the other is typing.

That makes it easier for Empire Flippers, but could be a security risk if 1 side provides passwords or other sensitive information in it.

Domain Transfer

This was the second annoying thing.

It costs zero to create an account on any domain registrar. The best practice here would be to push the domain to whatever registrar it’s currently on, then let the buyer transfer it on their own time down the line.

Domain “pushes” are instant on the same registrar, while a domain transfer (to a different registrar) can take anywhere from 3-10 days. Instead of doing a registrar push, the buyer insisted on a domain transfer which is a bunch more hoops that the seller has to jump through.

They can fix this just by allowing the seller to push the domain to whatever registrar the domain is currently owned at.

Waiting 5-10 days to see if a domain is transferred correctly is annoying and a waste of time as a seller.

Revenue Verification

Empire Flippers holds your money until the other party verifies traffic and sales.

This is annoying as a seller.

I understand why – they want to verify that they’re selling legit sites – but it’s VERY unfriendly to sellers.

Here’s why:

As a seller, you’re selling a site based on past performance – not future guarantees. In any site, technical changes affect SEO and performance. A seller shouldn’t be responsible for changes that the buyer could potentially jack up.

The seller is on the hook for poor implementation by the buyer.

Imagine if you wanted to buy a stock, but only had to pay if the stock went up?

That’d be great as a buyer, but as a seller, there’s only downside. No other market does that.

If something goes bad, the seller is screwed.

The buyer I dealt with wanted it transferred to his specific domain manager.

That’s cool but when you transfer registrars, you are automatically locked from moving that domain again – per iCANNs rules – for 60 days.

This is very annoying.

• This means that if the buyer screws things up – the seller is on the hook.
• This means if the buyer doesn’t “verify” the earnings – the seller is on the hook.
• This means that if the buyer for whatever reason doesn’t like the domain or website – the seller is on the hook AND can’t get back the domain for 60 days. So they’re out the sale, the domain AND 60 days of earnings (at the least). That’s a terrible policy.

I tried to put in a ticket on this, but the support team manually merged it into my transfer ticket (which let the buyer see it as well – which, again, is not what I intended) and is another problem with the shared transfer ticket.

Adding In A “Bonus” Site

Part of my deal with the listing was that I was going to throw in another WordPress theme related site (let’s call this one RT) to the buyer. It was a very similar site that did less traffic due to neglect – I hadn’t really done much with it.

The site generated no revenue and had minimal traffic, so throwing in the domain was meant to boost interest in the sale.

The problem came up (again) that the buyer wanted it transferred to a specific registrar and I was asked to do so.

Again, this is a terrible policy.

I was throwing in the domain and the site as a bonus, and it was a pain that it was taking even MORE of my time.

The buyer ended up creating an account at the registrar the domain was at, which was nice, but that should be the standardized policy.

Surprise: A Commission Fee

I should preface this: this is MY fault. This is pretty standard in brokering situations, but (for some reason I still don’t know), I was under the impression that the listing fee was the only fee I was going to be responsible for.

That said, once I was told how much I was getting paid ($1555.84), I was surprised to see the number lower than the sale price. After inquiring further, I only then realized the commission was on top of the listing fee.

Screen Shot 2015-10-21 at 4.16.30 PM

I don’t know why I didn’t realize this (I think I was just focused on clearing house and had other things going on). I was so sure that the listing fee was the only fee, that I went back and looked and sure enough, they say it RIGHT ABOVE the button to “sell the site.”

Proof

Oops. Apparently, I’m not a good speed reader.

While this is reasonable on larger sites, in total, between the listing fee and this, EF basically ended up eating 33% of my sale price which sucks.

Again, this is in the terms and conditions and is MY fault, but it’d be cool to see a “profit calculator” or a notice of “this is how much you’ll sell for” and “this is how much you’ll get” earlier on in the buying process so bad speed readers like me don’t get surprised :(

That said, let’s talk MONEY.

Getting Paid (Cash MONEY!) $$$

All right, the deal was done. The buyer was happy and everything was good to go.

Email

Not wanting to deal with Paypal, I opted for bitcoin. I’ve bought a few bitcoin in the past and didn’t mind stocking up on a few (just in case they go to a billion someday :)).

After trying to haggle Paypal minus the fees – I settled on bitcoin.

I got this message from Joe:

At this point, I was antsy to get paid, so waiting a full week to get paid seemed like ANOTHER preventable delay. I know there’s a bit of volatility with the price of bitcoin, but I think they should probably carry some bitcoin as a cost of doing service in order to accelerate some of these smaller transactions).

Nevertheless, on September 2nd, Joe sent $1,000 to my bitcoin address and sent the remainder on September 6th.

Website Sold. Transaction finished. #boom

Vital Stats For This Website Sale

For those of you scanning this, I dug up some of the numbers for this sale in order to give a quick overview of everything. I think it’s pretty interesting:

• Average Monthly Revenue: $91.52

• Revenue Multiplier: 20x

• Listed Price: $1,830.40

• Profit after Commission: $1,555.84

• Profit after Commission + Listing Fee: $1,258.84

• % of Sale Price Profit Realized: 68.7% (ouch!)

• Time from submission to listing: July 25th – August 17th = 23 days

• Time from start of transaction to sale: August 17th: 11:07pm – August 18th, 7:15am = 8 hours, 8 minutes – WOAH.

• Time from sale to $$$: August 18th – September 6th = 19 days.

• Time from submission to $$$: 43 days (1 month, 12 days). #doubleboom

Lessons Learned From Selling My First Site

If you’re going to sell a site, separate earnings out by the account / website level

This would have helped with the earnings numbers and verifications and cleaned things up from a security standpoint. I would have felt way more secure in sharing multiple accounts with them, and it would have sped up everything.

Get all the terms up front

Part of what annoyed me about the sale was that it wasn’t until after I made the sale that I was told I wouldn’t receive funds until the buyer verifies that they’re making money. I also didn’t realize that the listing fee was in ADDITION to the commission fee. I still would have listed with them, but I would have been aware of it, rather than surprised (to be fair, I take responsibility for this part, but I think it could have been clearer).

Understand the domain transfer clauses

I mentioned this above, but this was annoying as well and added 5 days to the transaction time. Domain pushes and transfers are very different things and can add a huge differential of time to the transfer process.

Know it’s going to be a PITA

I was really hoping that for such a small site and transaction, that it would be quick and painless. It ended up being a minor pain in the a$$ when I had a lot of other things I’d rather focus on – which was the reason I was selling it in the first place.

Conclusion

If you’re a buyer, Empire Flippers might be a good deal. Most of their policies are buyer-centric. This makes sense. Buyers will often buy multiple sites (they have money to spend), but sellers don’t sell nearly as often. It makes sense to build in policies to their business model that protect the people giving them money.

If you’re a seller (especially looking for a quick sell), the sale happened SUPER fast, but the transfer took way too much of my time to be worth it.

I was hoping they’d be much more direct and quick with the sale and hassle-free. However, it seemed like every step of the way (except the actual sale), I was dealing with a headache.

Part of their model includes using Filipino VAs. I have no qualms with that, but it did delay the process somewhat as most of the interaction took place on Filipino time (night-time stateside) and required solving miscommunication issues that did come up. Interestingly enough, if I worked normal hours (9-5 US time), this would have taken even longer – chalk another one up for night owls. This could be fixed by having VAs on duty round-the-clock or on US shifts (which is not unusual for outsourced services).

My Verdict on Empire Flippers

Based on my experience with Empire Flippers, I would give them a 6/10.

I’ve been building sites for a long time, but I’m a newbie at selling them.

Again, I’ve known the Empire Flippers guys since way back when they were Adsense Flippers and they do a ton of volume and move a lot of sites, so maybe people are having better experiences than me, but on this sale, I found a lot of things they could fix or improve on to be more seller-friendly.

I think a major part is that selling a site (especially one that could be considered a “small site”) is a headache in general. I felt like this took an inordinate amount of time for such a small site but to be fair, I’m not sure it would have been better with Flippa or anyone else (since you have to manage the process yourself), but it would be nice for it to be a little less painful.

It’s probably much more worth the squeeze if you have a bigger site that you’re listing, but if you’re thinking about Empire Flippers, here’s my verdict:

Pros

• Fast Sales

• Less headaches than other sites

Cons

• Process needs a lot of refinement

• Focus is on buyers over sellers

• Not going to get top dollar for your site

• Transfer is a headache

• No insurance if things go bad (that I know of).

Postscript

I talked with Justin Cooke (one of the founders at Empire Flippers) at a conference in Barcelona this past weekend about a lot of these issues.

One thing that I didn’t realize is that this size of deal (under $5k) they don’t really do much of anymore. For a lot of the reasons I outlined above, they don’t take on smaller sites, but also, the people BUYING smaller sites tend to be less experienced and delay the process (via many of the things I mentioned above).

For this reason, I think you’ll run into MANY of these problems with ANY sale UNDER $5k. It’s just the market and there’s not a lot of good options for getting rid of them. If I knew that going into this, I would have either

1) deleted it,

2) hired an assistant to grow it to something more salable,

3) just forgot about it.

Given the new knowledge, if I had a site to sell in the 5-10k range, I would consider giving them another shot, however, there are things from the seller’s side that I would like to see fixed.

This post was originally posted on Impossible. If you found it helpful, I'd love to hear your comments! Thanks.

So the profit will be $550. Is this a good return? I've been experimenting in different markets and had some great success and some terrible losses, but I'm learning and that's what counts. This next product I want to sell though has a huge untapped market, but as you know, cheap products sell cheaply. Right now I'm selling through eBay so there is also their fees and paypal withdrawal fees to consider after the profits, then postage costs, and then I'm guessing the profits will sit at around $480. Just thought I'd ask for some input. Thanks :)

Here's the site https://deepwoodsinnovations.com thanks again.

I was featured in an article for .inc.com and linked my month-old blog. I keep checking openlinkprofiler and other sites but the Inc. link will not come up for my paid SquareSpace site. Is it a problem on my end or theirs?

Hey everyone, So I have a website which is kindle related. If you don't know what Kindle is; It's the biggest ebook reading platform in the world by Amazon.

My site has been around a while now ( almost 2 years ), I think.

Anyway.. I feel like I could take it somewhere but honestly, I just have no clue where to start with it.

The website is not Amazon affiliate based but I have made money with this website using other programs and using facebook groups to advertise the posts. Back then, I could post in 600 groups at once and not get any blocks so it worked out well and I gained traffic.

Needless to say, I kind of gave up on the site due to lack of direction / interest and shiny object syndrome.

That being said, I notice people still upload their covers and use the website and it generates like 20 views a day which I guess is kind of okay.

So, I'm not looking for a backlink here but I'll share my website as I really don't care if anyone tries to copy it or not honestly.

www. Rate my kindle cover . com is the website

oh, I do have a mailing list of 100 people which is also another plus.

What would you do if this was your website? - Obviously the loading time is painfully slow and the site is a tad buggy but I can see some potential here.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I should just give the site up and stop wasting money on it.

Cheers :)

Alright here we go:

General advice: You should really find a better more targeted niche. The reality is your competing with massive news sites/magazines when you do a topic as general as men's lifestyle and entertainment. Ranking for keywords and getting organic traffic is going to be inherently difficult for you and very unsteady. I'm sure you've seen an eb and flow of organic traffic when one of your articles happens to do better on organic for a month but then slowly fades away. Consider going into a more specific niche (similar to how the above guy specializes in style for short people).

1) SEO - On page SEO is on point, no issues. Your off page SEO (backlinks) are the real weakness you've got here. You have a few powerful ones (fourhourworkweek) and a bunch of no-follow links. Unfortunately, these aren't much related to your niche (or lack there of) and aren't super beneficial. You've got great DA and PA, but to progress forward, you're going to need a LOT more backlinks.

Your at a very advanced point of your SEO journey, moving forward you either need to hire an SEO content generation firm (if they don''t create content specialized for SEO (no this doesnt mean keyword stuffing), then it won't work), or self train yourself through SEOthatworks.com - Well worth the money and you'll learn how to readily create content that generates backlinks.

Social - No easy ways to access your social accounts directly from the home page (besides a barely noticeable hyperlink on the newsletter) - I'd highly advise creating some sort of community, as I explained above, social media isn't for marketing, its for engagement and community building. Build a community around men sharing their lives or adventures/lifestyles and connect people. Consider making an exclusive Club of sorts. A great example of this is ecommercefuel.com - they have a paid exclusive group for eCommerce pros to talk. Point is, build communities, don't just blast your articles.

Paid Adverts - I don't currently detect any paid advertising - in general, paid advertising will be necessary for long term growth, but you'll need to do some math first. Generally speaking, a campaign can be set up so you never spend more than you make. So step one is to figure out how much one user makes you (typically counted as number of people on your email newsletter) - the average is $1 dollar per month per person. If you have a conversion rate of lets say 20% of visitors turn into newsletter subscribers, then 5 clicks at 20 cents each would result in a net zero acquisition. This will take a lot of research or hiring a firm but I think you get the point.

I apologize that your answer is a bit similar to the one above, but you are both in a similar space with similar needs to move forward.

P.S. I'd really focus on getting a more niche, niche, and backlink building

Hi everyone,

I'm relatively new to this sub, I've browsed around for a few months now and maybe posted a few times but I've never deeply engaged with the community.

In my experience as a digital marketing consultant and through groups on other social media sites, I've found that lots of people don't speak openly about digital marketing with each other and instead result to constant googling and self help guides etc that end up becoming overwhelming or confusing. I'd like to change that.

Let's talk about digital marketing! Ask me anything (ranging from SEO, to social, to PPC, to email, etc.) or post your website domain and I'll share at least 3 actionable changes you can make to improve your web presence immediately (or at least noticeably within a few weeks). Also, feel free to blast me on my thoughts or give feedback on how even I could do it better!

Lastly, feel free to message me for my LinkedIn contact info if you'd like access to a more long term digital marketing friend :P

Thanks and I look forward to chatting :D

*Note: These take me awhile to research and write (up to 30 min), please be patient with me <3

Business Development, don't provide a title, just the description. That's what I use.

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A lot of people have been asking about the basics of online marketing and how to get started and make money. So, I decided to put together this “outline” on the steps you need to take to get started, and what you need to be successful.

Keep in mind this is not a comprehensive explanation on exactly what you need to do, and as with anything else it takes time, patience, and a lot of effort to make any real money in the online marketing arena.

Sorry for the length in advance, but I wanted to make sure I give everyone a good layout so they can either ask more specific questions or they can take some immediate action with this information.

When I was learning it was nearly impossible to find an affiliate site that I could use as an example, it seemed everyone out there, the guys writing books and charging for this info, were so secretive. I don’t want you to go through the same trial and error. So I’m going to post the first site I ever made below for you to look at and see what not to do (I used black hat SEO with terrible content, which led to an 89% bounce rate and no money). I’m also going to post the site I launched last month which has useful content and no tricky SEO business which ranks on Google after only one month and that makes money. This way you’ll have a template to use for your own site.

www.paleodonebetter.com (this is the site that makes nothing) www.lyftsignup.us (this is the site that has generated $750 in just 30 days)

Step One: Find a Niche

You need to find a niche. The way I go about this is first search Clickbank.com to see what products are paying well and actually selling. I look for a Gravity score of at least 50, this means people are actually making money off of this.

After I find a couple good affiliate programs I head over to Amazon to see if they have products that I can sell to my readers, you need to make sure Amazon has enough items. This will supplement your income that you make from the affiliate program that you chose.

Step Two: Do the Research

At this point you should have at least 2 to 3 products in mind, possibly in different niches, but you need to do the research to see which is the most feasible. Your going to need a Google Adwords account for this, but don’t worry its free. After you get your account heard over to the Tools tab and use Google Keyword Planner, click the generate ideas tab to begin.

Type in your main keyword, for example if your affiliate program is for weight loss pills you might type in weight loss. Google will give you a bunch of related search data, export this into an excel file.

To get more keywords, long-tail keywords, take that weight loss keyword and put it into a site called ubersuggest.org. This will give you a giant list of long-tail keywords. Take that list and import it into Google Keyword Planner to get the data on the keywords.

Put that data into an excel sheet and delete anything that has less than 50 monthly searches. After this combine the lists, and sort it by monthly search volume. I don’t target anything over 1,000 searches because the competition is to stiff.

At the end you should have a list of at least 50 to 100 keywords with a search range of 1,000 to 50. These are the keywords you’re going to be focusing on.

Once you have this spreadsheet download Market Samurai, the free version will do just fine, and analyze the SEO completion for each keyword. Select the 20 keywords with the least completion from your list, we’re going to use that for content creation.

Step Three: Make a Publishing List

With these 20 keywords you need to start creating content targeting each keyword, this is your gameplan to get ranked on Google . Make sure each post is between 300 and 600 words, generally lists; along with short paragraphs do well. Make sure you use your targeted keyword a few times in the post, and once in the first paragraph for SEO purposes.

Finish at least 10-12 posts ahead of time, so you have content on your site as soon as you launch.

Step Four: Wordpress Site

I use GoDaddy and buy a domain name with hosting for a Wordpress site; once you have multiple sites it’s much easier to manage using the GoDaddy platform.

Select a theme, if you need help selecting a good theme let me know, then begin planning the design of the site and putting the blog together (include at least one picture for every post and link it to your affiliate code).

Your site should have at least a blog section, a resources section (for your Amazon Associate products), an about us page, and a contact page. Use the Yoast SEO plugin to do your on page optimization.

Step Five: Getting Traffic

Once your site is ready, meaning all your products are up, the affiliate links are placed, and the design and flow are to your liking you’re ready to start driving traffic.

The quickest way to get results is Google Adwords PPC, but this will cost you money. Start slow with a max daily budget of $5 and see what your CTR rate is on the ad (should be at least 2%). Then use a/b testing to improve these results.

In addition to this talk to as many people you can about what you’re doing, don’t spam anyone rather help people. If you have a weight loss website find some weight loss threads or forums and give people some good content, trust me your site will start getting a lot of traffic this way.

If your content is good and you add content at least once a week to your blog you should start ranking for your long-tail, low completion keywords in a few months. This will bring you organic search engine traffic and you’re off to the races.

If you’ve read this far I appreciate your time, and I hope you found the information to be helpful. You may have a lot of questions now that you know what you didn’t know 10 minutes ago. If this is the case feel free to contact me, I’ll do my best to either help or point you in the right direction. Below are some resources that are going to make your life easier; I hope you find them helpful. Again, thanks for reading and good luck, just work hard and give it some time, if you stick with you’ll start seeing results and dollars soon enough!

Product Selection (Niche Research): Clickbank.com (easy to join and start using immediately) Peerfly.com (there’s an application process, but its worth having a backup marketplace to find affiliate products) Amazon Associates (low commission (4%-7%, but it will supplement your website with pages/session numbers and some income)

Keyword Research: Google Adwords (free to start an account, you just need a Gmail account, you’ll be using Google Keyword Planner here and Adwords for PPC marketing) Ubersuggest.org (completely free and it’ll give you keywords that Google wont, great for long-tail keywords) Market Samurai (the full version is $150 if I remember correctly, but the free one is good enough to analyze your competition and see which keywords will be easier to rank for)

Website: GoDaddy.com (find the hosting tab and chose the managed wordpress option, purchase your domain name and build out your site from here) Yoast SEO (crucial for on page optimization for your SEO, also gives you good details on what your posts/pages are missing so you can improve them for SEO) vCite (great for inputing widgets that call your users to action, or for collecting emails to begin an email list you can blast market to push products)

Obviously ranking your site on the 1st page of Google is the holy grail in terms of keyword searches.

Is it still possible to make money if you're on much lower pages?

Anyone have sites that are making good money and aren't on page 1?

Hey Humble, could you give an example of the type of email outreach that you find works well?

Hey [Name]!

I recently read your [insert random well performing post] and just loved that you focused on [best piece of content] and how you blah blah blah...

As it so happens, [include pitch]

---

I agree, when we talk about broken links we can't just say "I was scraping the web for broken links and I'd like you to do me and your readers a favor and include my site in your page" (although I will be trying it), but when we reach out to people who have been around the block once or twice, do we really have pretend?

Wouldn't it be better to be honest and skip the first paragraph and instead focus on how WE are going to provide THEM and their readers value?

I've seen this template way too many times and I'm just annoyed.

What has your experience been, deviating from what the gurus recommend?

I believe you are not supposed to direct link to Amazon. So you can boost a post that leads to your website which then leads to Amazon, but not directly.

Lots of people still do however.

Hmm, could be the group page that triggered it. I know a few people who find those popular videos and then spam their amazon affiliate link to the top comment and most of those accounts are still going.

I have asked before in chat and posting links on social media is fine, just not paying to promote that post is what I was told.

I wouldn't know where to find a source but I attended 2 of them myself. The 1st being the march in march in Melbourne alone they were claiming in the area of 30, 000. I think that's an exaggerated claim but I would estimate 10-15, 000. That was just in Melbourne, the same time there were protests in sydney, brisbane, canberra, even darwin. There was no media coverage at all from what I saw. The other 1 I attended was fairly recently, I think around late August. It was much smaller but at least 5, 000 in Melbourne. There were many more in between with various numbers but my only source for those is the March Australia facebook page so the numbers aren't very reliable

There have been big protests around the country since march but they've been largley ignored

I apologize, I didn't give the specifics of my total sales, just my sales that are directly from Facebook.

It doesn't take into account my mailing list, Pinterest, Adroll, or direct hits. All of my new sales basically come from Facebook, and then I continue to advertise to them over and over again in different places that I can't tie to Facebook.

And please remember I didn't start with 100,000 likes. Last week we did $2,000 in sales.

And I never claimed to be rich. Just been posting my growth man and calling B.S. when I see B.S. as with the "Facebook Fraud" video. If that video is correct, can you please explain why I have a 98% page engagement?

Yeah the conversion rate has gone down a little bit when it was 50 hits per day vs 300 hits per day from Facebook. Conversion rate at 100K likes is about 1.3% now with a average order of $35.

It costed me $3,000 to get to this point, and now I have it. I get it for the rest of Facebook. Take that however you want man.

Edit: I can't grammar.

Edit #2: I only post 1 product picture a day too, I try not to spam people.

The idea of owning my own business has been extremely appealing to me for quite some time. I found the guide to starting up a professional cleaning service over at r/entrepeneurridealong ... but its just something that seems too good to be true. Yet there's a piece of me that thinks it is actually plausible.

I've dabbled in the business before as a teen when a family member owned 2 residential cleaning services. Pay was good and the work was tedious. I've recently decided to get back into it on the side and have had a few clients and done all the work myself. Considering expanding it and building it up into a profitable business.

Anyone have experience in running this type of business full time? Any pointers / suggestions.

So a "backlink" to an image is worthless? That's just what they're doing, I guess I will go the troll route then.

A few small websites have started copying and pasting my content, and I'm curious as to how much this can hurt me.

So far, I've been aggressively going after the ones that are in the same space as me, but there are a few completely unknown blogs that have copied me and don't appear to be selling anything. They just have a bunch of random articles with large chunks copied from a bunch of websites (and a weird disclaimer that they'll go after anybody who files a DMCA takedown against them).

Is it worth going after every example of plagiarism? It seems like that could get expensive.

This is the approach I have taken as well. Got a pingback from a site that just straight copy and pasted my content, but left the 3 or 4 links to different pages on my site in the article.

Another time I had someone steal an image to my site, but they direct-linked to the image hosted on my server. Thought about changing it to something pornographic or obscene to fuck with them, but decided to not risk them removing the backlink.

How do you find the conversion rates? I've heard Twitter is pretty terrible when it comes to conversions..

Do you own the influencer accounts, or do you pay for them to tweet something for you?

If the latter, could you share where/how you go about finding influencer accounts that are willing to take money for 'sponsorship'? And maybe perhaps the cost of doing so?

Thr twitter account itself is worthless. If it drives conversions for your business then it's worth something.

Thats surprisingly better than I'd expected from some of the stories I've heard, which is good to know. Thanks!

Hey buddy, just wanted to let you know for your case study post that several of your image links are down.

influential Twitter accounts? Is that like an alt-account you have that posts relevant posts to a field?

Bought a couple more domains recently and the email I registered them with was bombarded with emails thereafter from marketing companies offering 'Google submission services' or 'Search engine submission services' talking about 'how vital this service is for getting found'. Also got one or two sales calls from similar companies.

Clearly it's nonsense and a complete waste of money, since Google et al index websites all by themselves at no cost to you. It just takes a little bit of time, sometimes as little time as a few days. In one case a company was charging over £100 for this service.

I've bought more than 20 domains in the past two years and this is the first time this has happened, but you just know that a few people less experienced with Google and SEO will fall for this trick.

Well, check out resistance bands on amazon. I mean tell me thats not saturated. I mean there has to be a limit to how much you can improve a product currently. Resistance Bands --> Add thicker bands for quality, Add handles for better grip, Add a carrying case, different resistance, different colors, add special deal: buy 2 get one free, yada yada yada. How do you add more value than all that for example. Literally all those resistance bands from alibaba. All has been done.

Anyways, the affiliate marketing is pretty much being an expert on the topic. Write bunch of blogs --> content marketing. Get website views --> Add affiliate link --> Profit.

Its like I know the methods, but I'm just sitting here poor

So I am working on only one business that definitely has a higher barrier to entry. On the mean time I was doing a resell business, failing hard. Not going to source anymore, just whenever I am in a store then I will pick it up. So, for months I have been searching tirelessly fora niche to do the alibaba PL --> amazon thing. Seems everything is saturated.

So I gave myself a break, started to do some things I would normally do. I ended up on amazon because I needed things for my hobbies. Now with my newly found entrepreneurial perspective. I had no idea literally every product for my hobbies is a alibaba PL --> amazon. I'm like... what do I do now.I lived my life as a customer and still can't find a profitable niche.

Started looking into affiliate marketing. I just jumping around on idea and idea, while doing my real business. Still stay with ecommerce? learn affiliate marketing? They always said that nobody takes action, WTF everyone takes TOO MUCH ACTION. Tons of DO'ers.

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Although I have had some entrepreneurial success, but I never had to do any SEO or ranking to get to my customers. I'd like to find out what your stance is on PBNs.

This is what I know about them, mind you I know not enough.

PBNs or Private Blog Networks are minisites that I would create with the sole purpose of ranking my main site. They are in the same general niche and talk about complimentary topics. I don't care about their content nearly as much. I write them for the search engines, not for the people. My goal is for them to be easily recognizable for Google. After that, I link to my main site. This way, instead of doing contributing for my backlinks - I create them myself. I add nothing of value for these backlinks, they don't contribute at all, nor will they ever bring in direct traffic - they just "look" good in Googles eyes.

One of my first businesses was a YouTube marketing service (We sold views). This was around 4 years ago when it was extremely profitable. 1MM views would get you to the front page of YouTube, where you would pick up another 300-500k in 24 hours. It was a gold mine. Instead of us trying to rank videos, we serviced people. We sold the views. 1MM went for $900 back then. Cost was minuscule, it was mostly profits. We battled with YouTube almost weekly. They would find a way to stop us, we would search for a way to get around it. Fortunately, I wasn't the technical guy. I just had to find buyers. Unfortunately, I went in at the end of the golden era. I made some easy money but it was a bad experience. I know I was gaming a system and (call me a pussy) - I disliked it. I knew that there were hard working content creators out there who were hurting.

BTW, you'd be surprised how many people bought views. Most of the biggest YT celebs did, politicians as well.

Ever since, I have a strong dislike for anything "unethical" that tries to game the system. I don't believe in faith or karma or any of that mumbo jumbo. I'm much more narcissistic in that aspect - I just want to work hard and get rewarded accordingly. Putting in the effort and seeing what I produce blossom is what makes me happy in all aspects of life. As such, I will never use a PBN, I'll concentrate on producing insightful content and market it as best I can. I'd like to hear your stance on this issue.

As most of you know I had my first couple of sales on my site last week, sales dimmed down however but it was expected (some referal caused most of those). On the other hand my social media traffic is starting to rank up, to a point of 80 people a day.

Conversion on them is lower then I hoped for, but I found an affiliate that gives away a free item so I am expecting that will get me some extra cash (great deal as far as I am concerned).

However when I started the site I just rushed most of the design parts, because honestly I am not a very creative person.

However now, more and more I realise that I need to create a solid brand and logo and design pattern in my posts in fb and instagram. To get more people to recognise me as a authority.

Any advice on the follow:

• What would be a good place to get a logo designed, I don't really plan on spending more then a couple of bucks. But I feel like fiverr has low quality designs.

• How did you guys decide on your colour pallete? I am using lifestyle pro a genesis theme and honestly I can't get the right colour in that makes it look clean.

Am I overthinking it? or am I on the right track here?

Hey everyone, I'm working on a case study about a client of mine who was able to go from a base of zero to significant first-page rankings on google within about three months.

I feel like the article just keeps getting longer and longer, one principle leads to another, etc... I need to focus it down.

I want to make this really helpful and actionable, so my question for you is what specifically would you like to know about how he did that?

Are you working on something similar and hitting any particular road blocks? The more specific you can be about your project and your question, the better of an answer I can give.

I'll answer some things here, and post the full workup here when it's finished.

Thank you for answering. I had a question but....... you already wrote so much so I deleted it. Thanks again.

How come with your extensive knowledge you don't open your own "guru" site for an easy extra income? I imagine there are a lot of people who respect your opinion. The only reason I can think of is that you think you can make more money by not sharing your strategy OR you're so morally driven that you don't want to endorse products with affiliate systems you dont' believe in? It's not a marketing question it's a .. person.. character question I guess? ( I'm very sorry for crashing your comment like this but you've said you don't want personal messages) If no answer I'll respect that and keep silently learning from you still.

Good question; For one targeted keyword, the front page has nine organic results. Of those, six are his site. So basically he owns the front page for that search term.

As for competition, what single metric would you use to communicate how competitive a keyword is? Avg monthly searches on Google from the keyword analyzer? Perhaps something else?

Hope this doesn't break rule #5 - don't be a dick.

This guy is total trash - here's why:

I was able to figure out his money site by just examining the image he had in his post (http://i.imgur.com/fy3EafP.png). I simply adjusted the contrast/levels/exposure options in Photoshop to reveal enough letters in order deduct his money site (proof: http://i.imgur.com/oBjAKRu.jpg) These few letters along with the preview thumbnail was enough for me to believe that his money site is https://www.portableacnerd.com.

So I did a quick backlink audit and determined this guy does a hybrid PBN + hacks into sites/finds exploits to place links back to his own money site.

He has backlinks from the following sites (completely unrelated to his niche and can tell they were sneakily added into the article to go undetected):

http://www.poynter.org/2010/states-undertake-a-cash-for-clunkers-program-for-appliances/100971/ http://www.helliwood.de/2009/01/learning-and-technology-world-forum-2009/ http://www.kasplacement.com/writing-an-effective-sales-resume/

I stopped looking through more cause I don't really care that much. Plop it into OSE or any other backlink crawler of your choice to verify.

This guy gives SEO peeps a bad name - who wants to report him to the Google Spam authorities? Hell, I am sure he is breaking a few laws as well.

I'm usually not a link sharing sort of guy, but as someone who is always on the lookout for some gems to get an edge up and learn new stuff I thought I'd share this one if you haven't seen it yet:

https://techtage.com/amazon-affiliate-niche-site-guide/

I have to give his kid Rohit some credit, after looking him up he's really been hustling since he was crazy young, like 14 young.

If you have years of experience in this space it's probably nothing earth shattering but it's still one of the most in-depth and transparent guides I've seen on the topic in recent memory.

The best thing on that site is the logo.

I always found it funny how these kinds of sites always have the same "look" to them. Even without exploring the backlinks you could assume with 99% certainty how this site ranks. No value added here.

Preach. Yesterday I found a "competitor" with a slick theme and a few posts up. His "reviews" are each a paragraph long, every umbrella post is titled "Best [keyword] 2016", every single picture is stolen. All that jazz.

But, here is what takes the cake: His sidebar content (Removed)

Yes, this guy is proudly displaying Sitebull (an "authority niche creating service") and a PBN rental service (<-- lol).

Who said niche marketing isn't fun?

Edit: I've removed the image from my post as it came up on google image search together with the guy's website.

Thanks for the feedback. Unlike This is Why I'm Broke, we stay away from over-priced products, no matter how cool they are. We also avoid adding gag products or products that have no real use to the end-user, no matter how share-worthy they are. If it's not apparent upon landing on our site, we're also targeting a less geeky & masculine audience. So far it's working out for us, however, we do have to work on communicating our value proposition better. We've just been focusing on traffic since it's holiday season.

From a marketing perspective, social media IS our primary focus, and an area at which we both excel so it's not a concern for us.

We actually just moved from full time to part time. It was in no way a financial risk, we just both have busy lives. So far, it's turned out to be well worth it.

Hey Redditors,

Two months ago my best friend and I decided to quit our full-time jobs and dive into the world of affiliate marketing. With backgrounds mostly in marketing, we had no idea how to build a website, but after a few Wordpress tutorials and many, many headaches, our site, Salt n Pop, is now live!

So what is Salt n Pop? It's basically a hand-picked selection of the coolest lifestyle products available online. We have about 100 products up at the moment, but lots more are on the way. We'll also be posting blogs regularly.

We would love your feedback in terms of branding, design, user experience, and your overall opinion of the site and its content.

Check it out here: http://saltnpop.com

Thanks a bunch :)

Cassandra & Angela

Interesting articles about SEO...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/07/13/seo-the-state-of-linkbuilding-in-2015/

and

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/fresh-thoughts-on-link-building-seo/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=seonewsletter_072215-wednesday

For some reason my incredibly small mind couldn't come up with a better title to this thread, so let me explain.

I'm currently doing a ton of outreach for guest posts to build links to my site. In most cases, the site owner will ask you to pitch them with topics first, giving you a chance to actually talk to them before writing so that you can agree on a topic and not just write some random article they have no interest in. In this scenario, I'm getting great results and having no problem scoring guest posts and links.

However, there are also a good majority of sites that tell you NOT to pitch them, to just send in your guest post and if they like it they will post it. These sites range from small blogs to high-authority brands, and I'm coming across a lot of them that I would love to get links from.

For those who have experience in this outreach scenario, what are your results typically like? Do a good percentage of sites accept your guest posts and end up publishing with your links? The last thing I want to do is spend time writing a shit ton of random articles just to get 3 of them accepted. With that said, I also don't want to skip out on the opportunity to score links from these sites either.

Curious to hear everyone's opinions on how you usually go about this scenario.

Edit: clarification