After missing out on the previous A4U competition, several affiliates including myself have decided to start a new competition.
This time the niche is Gold Jewellery and at the minute there are 11 of us taking part, although as the competition doesnt start until the 15th June feel free to join in! There’s no prize, just a bit of friendly competition. The winner is whoever has made the most profit by the end of the year.
Unlike all my previous websites and domains, I will be blogging about the site in detail and (hopefully) how much it has earnt! So, the first step in entering the competition…picking a niche!
Im not sure how everybody else goes about selecting a niche, personally for me I loaded up a few jewellery merchants with a decent conversion and commission rate and had a quick browse through each for product ranges of items with an average value of £100+. First one I found was gold lockets. Prices start at around £50 and go up to £350+, most costing around £100+. So with a 10-15% comission rate that most jewellers offer I should be able to earn an average of £10 per order quite easily.
The next step for me is checking the search volume with the Google Keyword tool, “Gold Locket” gets 9,900 exacts per month, with “Gold Lockets” bringing in about 4,600 exacts. Now normally I would do a bit more digging on exact traffic, including setting up a PPC campaign to see how many impressions I get for the selected keywords, but I dont have time to do that for this competition.
The penultimate step is competition, looking at the existing SERPs, the top spot is taken by a large site which is fairly well optimised and has quite a few backlinks to that individualy page, however all the links come from 2 different domains which are part of the same network. In second place its ebay! That sold it for me, and looking down the rest of the results there was no real competition at all. Im confident that I can get second easily, it will take a little bit more work to topple the top spot, but it shouldnt be a problem.
Now the final step, the domain name! Obviously goldlocket . co.uk was gone, hmmm, where from here, solidgoldlocket, whitegoldlocket, then the other half chirped up with, “why dont you just get ‘agoldlocket.co.uk’”, a few minutes later it was registered 
Next step, the design…
A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 15 Minutes
A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00
[...] A4U Gold Jewellery Competition [...]
Have you found the Google Adwords technique (checking impressions served) a good method in the past for more accurate search volume?
Seems to have been accurate for me. Obviously its never going to be 100%, but I have found that if I get 100 impressions per day on a PPC, if I get to number 1 in Google I will receive around 50 uniques per day.
How did the competition pan out? Anyone strike gold?
Dont know about anyone else. My site has bounced around quite a bit – now settled at number 1
Didnt make a massive amount – made a few sales in the run up to christmas and a few this month – dont think I’ll target jewellery again though. Conversion rate is overall quite low (as expected – most poeple want to see the jewellery they are buying).