As well as affiliate marketing, I dabble in a bit of domaining. The two kind of go hand in hand, you reg a domain and plan to develop it, but then decide you dont have time to develop it so try and sell the domain.

This post is about a recent experience with one of my domains. I bought the domain after seeing it on a drop list. It was a two word .org.uk domain. The exact match only got around 200 searches per month, however if you swapped the first word for a very similar word (along the lines of “motorcycle” to “motorbike” the number of searches went up to around 3,000 per month. After a quick search, I saw that Google was using the two first words as pretty much meaning the same. If you searched for the one in my domain, the more searched term appeared and vice versa.

After a few months on my “development list”, I decided not to bother developing it and get rid instead. I offered it to several people who where looking to buy similar domains on various forums. Nobody was interested, even at £20. After offering it to a few people I gave up with it and put it on a “drop list”.

As with all of my domains, I had installed wordpress and put up a couple of pages of content when I bought it, but not done any backlinks to it. Last month, I received an email offering £100 for the domain! First thought was to sell it – however I then checked the rankings and saw it was ranking 6th for the exact match term and 13th for the higher searched term. I did a little bit of link building with Article Marketing Robot and within a week I was ranking number 1 for the main term and top 3 for the other term. Now I had a domain which may be worth something! I emailed the person back who made the original offer and asked them to make a new offer – no response!

I then spent a few minutes to pull off contact details for all of the companies using AdWords on both terms and write an email to them all, asking for offers. Within 30 minutes I received an email back saying they where interested! I sent an email back saying open to offers, but I had contacted other companies and would be taking the highest first bid, or the first bid I was happy with. No response again. Again I was starting to get a bit annoyed (even though I had only sent the original emails out less than an hour ago!), so popped out for a take away. Got back to a response from them offering mid £xxx! Great, a domain I couldn’t sell for £20 was now going to sell for mid £xxx. However, before I had chance to reply, another company emailed back asking for a price. I sent them the same email as the previous company and within minutes had a response offering very high £xxx which I immediatly accepted and have now sold!

So a domain which I bought for £7 and had decided wasnt worth the £7 after not being able to sell for £20, suddenly became worth over 100 times more than I paid for it with literally a few minute work (a couple of Article Marketing Robot blasts which could have been outsourced on Fiverr for $10 or so). This is my second big domain sale so far, with a dozen or so smaller sales in between. I have around 70 domains (mixture of extensions), although most are now developed and only around 10-15 are ones I would sell, with my total expenditure on domains so far being around £400. So far from selling domains, I have made over £3k in profit in the last year or so.

One of the things I really love about affiliate marketing already is going to bed! Seriously, not only is it the only time my brain stops thinking about it – but when knowing that your websites are working away earning you money through the night is great. Sometime last night, I got a big order from my first affiliate marketing website through Amazon – 26 books and a video game (which is what my website is marketing!), grand total of the order was about £200 which made me about £12 in commission!

Its a pity I dont get orders like that every day, I would have already hit my July target if I did. It gave me a good push though, one website made £12 in one night. If I get my 20 websites up and running and each site makes 1 sale like that per month I will hit my target!

This is also one of the reasons why I prefer Amazon over any other affiliate, their massive range of products. If I had put my video games website through to say Game or Gamestation etc then rather than a £200 order, I would have got a £20 order which is why wherever possibly I will be using Amazon as my main affiliate and possibly use a few others as “backup” or to cover niches where Amazon isnt as competitive or doesnt stock the range of products Im selling.

So, I finally decided that making websites for other people had so many downsides and risks involved so decided to start thinking about my options. I remembered signing up with Trade Doubler when I was about 14 and making a little bit of money (about £100 if I remember correctly). So, if I could make £100 back then just “messing about” with it, its got to be worth another stab?

So here I am, at the beginning of what will hopefully be a long and successful path in the world of affiliate marketing. By no means am I expecting this to be an easy task, hell I know it wont be, but can you name anything worth having that is?

In the first month as an affiliate marketer I have already had some really good weeks, and some really bad weeks. I started just before Christmas 2009, and within days of my first real affiliate site being up I was ranked at number 1 for my main search term, bringing in a handful of visitors a day and making a sale or two each day! It wasnt much but it was a start. Then Christmas came and went again, and with it, so did my sales. The first two weeks in January made me nothing, zilch! Yeah, thats pretty disheartening. I still dont understand it either – I was getting the same amount of clicks, the same amount clicking through to the merchant (Amazon in this case), but nobody ordering a damn thing!

Anyway, hopefully that time is behind me, for the last week or so I have made a couple of quid a day (from one site), its a start, and something I can build on! I have set myself a few goals and deadlines I would like to hit them in.

July 2010 – At least 20 websites earning commission to a minimum of £10 per day (£3.650 per year) (combined)

December 2010 – At least 40 websites earning commission to a minimum of £50 per day (£18,250 per year) (combined)

I feel they are realistic targets. 20 sites earning 50p per day within 6 months, turned into 40 sites earning £1.25 per day in 12 months – doesnt sound that difficult. I’ve allowed myself a week per site, with a few weeks spare for holidays etc. Obviously if I hit a gem of a website I think can earn more, I will spend more time on it.

The idea of eventually being able to work for myself as an affiliate marketer is the dream which will keep me going through the bad patches and keep me focused when the websites are making some money. The main benefit not even being working for myself, but being working from where ever I want – with just my trusty laptop and an internet connection – as one thing you will soon learn about me – I love the sun! The idea of being able to take off, travel where ever I want and spend a few months at a time in the sun is like heaven.

So theres the intro, who I am, what I want and how Im going to get it, guess I best get on with some work now

Article Marketing Robot.

Bookmarking Demon