One of my product specific sites I developed at the start of the year is making decent sales each day, and traffic is also increasing each day. The merchant has given me a £5 discount voucher to promote on the site (and several other sites which point to the same merchant) which works out at roughly 10% discount.

Now the problem I have is that my traffic has been, and still is converting at approximately 9% without the voucher. By adding the voucher Im going to need to hope that the conversion rate increases to at least 10% to make up the loss in commission that I have made on the other orders.

I’ve never pushed discount codes before, so im not sure what percentage increase I can expect, but I have put the code live for a week and will see what difference it makes. If its not benfiting me I will remove it again. In theory, by putting the code on there I SHOULD get a higher conversion rate (who doesnt like a 10% discount??), hopefully high enough to not only cover the loss in commission but also increase the amount of commission I am getting.

Anybody else had any experience with discount codes on single product sites? I know my 9% conversion rate is already pretty high (merchant average is around 4%), Im going to need a 10% conversion (10% increase) to match without the voucher and preferably at least an 11% conversion (20% increase!) to make it worth promoting the discount voucher.

Is a 20% increase realistic given that all my traffic is targeted and looking a specific product? I guess only time will tell! I’ll update in a week or so.

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Procrastination refers to the deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. – Wikipedia

I havent posted for a while, I’ve been busy doing, erm, checking my stats and reading other peoples blogs. I was starting to drift again, convincing myself that I was working when I knew I wasnt.

Fortunately one of my sites I had developed a few months ago whirred into action last week as the product was eventually released – after a month of being delayed! Since launch date I have sold quite a few – which isnt suprising as I am ranking number 1 & 2 for all my main keywords! Later in the week I had an email from my account manager at the merchant I am pushing the traffic through to telling me they have just sent one of the items to “This Morning” and also “The Telegraph”, so I’m hoping that this will bring in some extra traffic and increase sales even further.

The increase in sales helped get me out of the rut I was falling into and I started working on updating prices on one of my sites. After updating about 50% of them I decided there must be an easier way. This one site had about 30 products and was going to take the best part of an hour to update and ideally needed doing every week! So I set to work creating a PHP script to scrape the prices from Amazon.

I now have 2 different scripts, one which will trawl a WordPress install, check the custom fields for URL’s and grab a new price for them, and a second script which I designed for the sites which dont use wordpress. This basically has a table behind it which stores a URL, Price, and a couple of other pieces of information, the script runs through the whole table, updates all the prices and saves them. All I need to do on the site is insert a variable now where I was the price to insert and it pulls the price from the database, which is updated every day! It took me about 5 hours to put the whole thing together but it works well and is now implemented across all my sites, automatically fetching prices from all the merchants I promote and updating my sites for me – no more manual updating!

Now, the final task I had set for the weekend, which was also the task I had set myself to complete in the week before, and the weekend before, and the week before that….(you get the picture!), finish the design for one of my sites! I dont know why I had been putting this site off for so long but I had managed to put it off for near on a month. I decided before I moved on to any more work I had to get that site finished! So I spent the best part of Sunday designing the theme, turning it into a wordpress theme and writing some more copy. The design, along with affiliate links went live at around 5pm…done…finished! Just need to do some offsite SEO now to push it up the rankings (currently sitting 6th for the main keyword and in the top half for several long tail keywords).

This morning, much like every other morning I checked my earnings at Amazon, Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window. The site I had just finished uses PaidOnResults, which I didnt see the point in checking after about 12 hours of the site being live. Next on the list, check my emails (yes checking earnings now comes above checking emails!). Halfway through deleting all the spam I noticed a “Daily Summary” from PaidOnResults. A bit confused at never receiving one before despite the fact I had been signed up for a month I thought I would have a check and see what was actually in their summary. Pending Commission: £9.60! After just 12 hours of being live the site had already made me a sale, and a decent amout of commission!

Now, if only I had finished that site a month ago… Lesson learnt, stop thinking about doing things and get on and do them!

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My clearout of domains and websites is almost complete, so I thought I would write a post about what I have leart while clearing out my old portfolio.

1) Just because you thought it was a great domain, doesnt mean it is! I have a few domains which I thought were great domains that I could develop, or just sell on and make a decent profit on. However, after listing them several times on Digital Point it has become clear that not everyone has the same opinions of what makes a good domain. Needless to say, it works the other way as well. I had a couple of domains I was expecting to just let expire, s0 when I was offered $50 (about £30) for one of them I snapped their hand off!

2) Timewasters are… a waste of time. I sold a couple of websites/domains to users, who then refused to reply to emails/pm’s. I even made the mistake of even turning down an offer from a different user while waiting for a timewaster to reply. After the first two timewasters I decided if the user didnt get in touch within 24 hours I would sell the website to someone else.

3) Sell to a trustworthy seller. I had an offer of $1000 for one of my sites, however there was something very strange about the buyer. Wasnt interested in seeing proof of earnings, he had different names/usernames/emails for Digital Point/GoDaddy/Escrow. When I asked him about it, he insisted it was because he was in the forces and didnt want them to find out what he was doing online – which seemed even stranger. Anyway, I stopped the sale and held onto the site for another couple of months and eventually sold it to a reputable seller (he had already bought one of my cheaper sites), for 20% less than the original offer – but I had the money in my account within 10 minutes of agreeing the sale and everything went as smooth as possible! It might not always be the best offer, but I would personally rather take a guaranteed $800 over a possible $1000 any day.

Overall I am quite pleased with how easy it was to clear out the domains, and how much I actually made.  I have sold 14 domains/sites so far which cost me approximately $60. I wasnt hoping to make much profit, enough to cover a years decent hosting (£100/$160), in total from all of the sites/domains I sold, I ended up with about $1500 in my PayPal account – almost 10 times what I wanted and I still have another 3 or 4 undeveloped names to clear out.

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Just a brief update on how things are going in the affiliate marketing world for me. Firstly some of my small sites have been making sales (one which is a couple of months old and has never made a sale, made 5 sales within 2 day last week!), not much but they have been keeping me out of those horrible “no sale” days.

I got accepted for the Woolworths affiliate over the weekend so I have started loading the site with products, although I need to take a look at the database and see if there is any quicker way of getting all the products on. Im confident enough I can write a PHP script which will take the product feed and update any price changes and create a list of any new/deleted products – but putting 1100+ products into wordpress manually is a bit time consuming so need to get this automated if possible. The first week I wrote my 2 articles for the site as planned, but then last week I didnt do any so I need to get back into that and possibly write 3 for the next 2 weeks to catch me up.

My video game website is doing well and for the last week has been making a sale most days, which isnt bad considering its only receiving 10-15 uniques per day. I need to give the site a revamp and add a blog section to hopefully bring in a bit more search engine traffic (most is direct or referred from facebook at the minute). I could also do with building up the facebook fans, so I’ll be doing a bit of research on that when I get chance.

I also need to work on building backlinks. I have quite a few sites which are currently sitting at middle/bottom of the first page and I think with a few decent backlinks I could shift up to the top half of the page. Although this should be covered in the “Advanced Search Engine Optimisation” course which Im going to in a few weeks.

Im also going to try and sell my last non affiliate marketing website on either Digital Point or Flippa. The last one is my big site, although it only makes cash when I post really and as its mainly US traffic its difficult for me to post many deals (mainly due to the time difference). I had originally hoped for $1000 (£600), which is about 10 months earnings but Im now expecting to let it go for a bit less as I just want to get rid of it now.

I’ll update again when I have something interesting!

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So, my original plan was to create a site week and hope that by the end of the year that each site was making me at least £1 a day. Since starting though I have decided that larger sites may be the best way of getting a decent income from affiliate marketing. I’m still going to create some smaller sites, probably one per month, but I am going to focus on my two large sites for the remainder of the month.

My first large site is in the Toys market. The site is pretty much ready to go, I have a few articles written, now im just waiting for my chosen merchant to approve me. Once they have approved me I’m going to need to import all of the products (which will all need at least some manual work) so that will take a while. However once I have all the products in I will write a PHP script to update all the necessary fields direct from the feed, change the merchant links on products which are no longer stocked, and send me an email with the details of any new products.

The second site is my gaming site which I started and was going to leave. The site has now made me 3 sales, and the Facebook account has 14 fans (last time I looked it was 2!). The site needs a few changes (add a blog, remove adsense blocks, add an expire button etc) and then it will be a case of me up dating it more often, checking for deals 2 or 3 times per day.

I also purchased a domain name over the weekend (I know, I really need to stop buying them, but I have sold most of my others now) which is a follow up to the biggest toy craze of last year. I got a direct match on a .co.uk domain for it as it was only announced recently at the Toy Fair. If nothing else, I would imagine I could sell it for a decent profit undeveloped

After a bad week last week, this week is looking quite promising. I’ve made a few sales each day since Sunday which has put my earnings back up to what they where towards the end of January. This morning I noticed that one of my sites I had created a few weeks ago had made 2 sales since Sunday from only 12 uniques! The site hasnt even been updated in the last 10 days!

My new toys website is really starting to take shape now as well. I’m amazed at what I have managed to do just using wordpress! I’ve picked one main merchant to promote and just need to hope they accept me now! They pay 40% more than the industry standard (7% compared to 5% standard from most toy merchants). I’ve been scribbling down ideas for blog posts for the website as well so that when the site is ready I will have some decent content to pack it with initially, then Im going to try to write at least one post (hopefully two) per week once its up and running.

The deal site I mentioned earlier, I had originally planned on leaving as it was going to take too long to keep up to date as I was manually searching deal sites, checking the deals out myself and then writing a post about the deal. However having made the 2 sales from 12 clicks I’ve decided it may be worth working on it, so now once the Toys website is finished I will be redesigning the games website and streamlining the updating process.

Last weekend I started to feel a bit “under the weather” and have been feeling worse each day since, so I have felt pretty bad all week.

Each night I check my earnings and make a note of them. After a dead first 2 weeks in January, I had a decent last 2 weeks, which put me on track to hit my targets. It had been nearly 3 weeks since my last no sale day, and over a month since my last no earnings day (no sale, but made money from adsense on some of my old sites).

So, how well did I do this week? Awful! I havent made a single sale since Tuesday, and have made a total of about 50p! So as you can imagine, Im not happy.

On a slightly better note though, I finished the site for one the domains I registered last weekend, just waiting for Google to index it now. The site I created the week before is now ranking 8th in Google purely based on on page SEO, so I will be doing some offsite SEO on it to move it up the rankings. I also finished the design for my new toy affiliate site and have a couple of posts ready.

So over the last few days I have been thinking about my websites and how Im going go about hitting my targets I have set. I have decided to try and make a couple of large affiliate sites, and then quite a few small niche sites.

Over the weekend I started two new sites, both small niche sites which are growing in popularity and will bring in about £5 per order.

I have also decided on a large site which I am going to build. The guys that know me will know that I used to work for an online toy retailer, MailOrderExpress which used to be the largest toy shop in Europe for almost 4 years. So I have decided to go back to what I started with, TOYS!

I have a domain name sorted, 6 characters, brandable and contains the word “toys”. I havent said before but, at least for now, I wont be posting any of my domains names on this site.

While reading through Kirstys blog over at Affiliate Stuff I found quite an old, but still applicable post.

One of the main things people want to know when starting out in affiliate marketing, how much cash can I make? Well the answer is, how much do you want!

There are affiliate marketers out there earning hundreds of thousands per year (my idols!), and there are thousands more who think that throwing a website up with a couple of affiliate links on will make them a millionaire before the end of the week.

The fact is, as I am finding out myself, there is money in affiliate marketing, but dont expect it to be given to you on a plate. You will need to work for it, the harder you work, the better the reward. There is no magic key that will unlock a super rich lifestyle over night, but given time and hard work, there is no reason why anyone cant make some cash from affiliate marketing, whether it be enough to pay for your holiday each year, or enough to live on!

In a previous post I set myself a target of £50 per day by the end of the year. Seems quite a lot, zilch to £19k in a year! Surely not possible? Lets break it down a bit, and show you exactely how possible it is.

At the end of 12 months (365 days), I want to be earning a total of £50 per day. So, during that 365 days I need to do enough work to add 14p per day to my income! I had planned to put up 1 website a week. As long as that website is earning my 98p a day by the end of the year I will hit my target (50 sites @ £1 per day = £50 per day).

So now if I said you have 1 week to make a website that within a year will make you 98p a day you would probably day thats easy. Well if you can do that every week, for a year, you’ve just earnt youself a nice £19,000 per year bonus!

One of the things Im really looking forward to is the fact that each website I make will continue to make me money for as long as it is relevant. Lets say I get up to £20k in the first year (remember, its only 14p per day!), in the second year I lose 50% of the commission from those sites, Im still earning £10k. If I repeat my first year, by the end of the 2nd year I will be earning £30k, repeat this several times, combined with the fact you will get better and soon be making sites earning a lot more than 14p per day and theres no limit to the amount you can earn.

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This is one of the most asked questions I have read while reading up and trying to learn as much as I can about affiliate marketing and search engine optimisation.

Here is my quick 5 step guide that I use for finding and chosing a new niche.

1) Think of a keyword. Normally an advert will come on TV or I will read something which will give me an idea for a keyword. For the sake of this post we will use “Toasters” as the keyword.

2) How Large Is The Niche – Use Google Keyword Tool to get a rough number of searches per month and also similar keywords and phrases. Make sure you use “Exact” match rather than “Broad” match. As you can see the term “4 slice toaster” gets 22,000 keyword searches per month.

3) Domain Name – Is the exact match on the domain name available? If you are targeting the UK market you want either a “.co.uk” or “.org.uk” – in that order. For this example both are taken, but we will pretend that the “.org.uk” is available for the sake of this example.

4) Check Your Competition – The next thing to do is to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Try searching for your keyword – what results come up. You want to check the first page, how well optomised are the pages? Do you feel you could outrank them?

5) How Large Is The Niche REALLY! – But we already covered this in step 2 you say? The Google Keyword tool isnt 100% accurate, its for getting a rough idea only! I found the easiest way of finding the actual amount of searches is to use Adwords. Simply create an account and set up a campaign for your keyword “4 slice toaster”. Now this is where you need to do the exact opposite of what you would normally do when creating an adwords campaign. You DONT want people to click your ads, you just want to see how many impressions it gets. So on this example you might bid on the word “4 slice toaster” but make your advert about Safari Parks, or something else totally disconnected from the actual keyword so that you will get as few clicks as possible. Let the campaign run for a few days then have a look how many impressions you have. From that you will be able to work out the actual number of searches per month. You may want to look at the trends section in the Keyword tool in order to take any seasonal variation into account.

Now, provided you picked a decent niche to start off with, found a keyword using the keyword tool, got an exact match on the domain and then finally the adwords searches are good enough to create a decent amount of traffic once you get your site listed, you have found yourself a tidy little niche that could make you some decent money.

Now you need to get on with creating the website

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