*shudder* well this is a question that gives me the total willies and no mistake about it! Ben wants to know how I’d approach things if I were just starting out…
I wondered if I could ask two questions, as I like your philosophy of no-nonsense building content sites, accepting that their is no shortcut or get rich quick.
1 – If you were to start again with no affiliate sites or domains, how would you go about building up an online business? Would you still do content sites,or maybe look at something else considering the web landscape of 2010? Would you, for instance, write hundreds of articles before going live? Would you concentrate on one site or several? Just any comments on strategy.
2 – If someone got down to building content affiliate sites with SEO, full time, and followed your philosophy of no substitute for hard work, do you think it’s feasible to make a living of AM within a year?
For background, I’m a good writer and know my stuff re building websites. I also know the theory of SEO and Internet Marketing, though have only ever really made pocket money in return for my very part time efforts so far.
Any comments really appreciated!
Ben
Really good questions Ben!
1. I would definately still go down the content route although without any existing sites to run I might well experiment with marketing via things that interest me at the moment such as Twitter and Facebook groups. I haven’t really yet found the time to really play around with those, but I still feel that the majority of my online strategy would be around the creation of quality content.
I would take a micro approach to building and developing any sites. Rather than trying to create a whole big site and everything that went with it offline I’d sort of section it off into managable chunks. You can create a site that for all intents and purposes functions well using just 10 to 15 pages and add on more as you go. This means you can get search engine traffic trickling through the site quicker and use what you learn from it to shape future efforts.
The question of concentrating on one site or several is a difficult one. From a resources point of view, only doing one as a newbie makes a lot of sense. However, from a “progressing your business and testing lots of niches” point of view it makes less sense. One of the things I think I’d find difficult if I had to start out as a newbie in 2010 would be niche identification. With 90% of content sites I’ve created I’ve already known I was going to make money with them, what some of the bestselling products were to get me kicked off, and which merchants I should concentrate my efforts upon. This is a huge benefit, and means I’ve only really put effort into writing content I already knew would yield profit. Huge advantage for my business.
Before you get all excited and ask me for my big secret method, I’ve got this advantage because in the past I’ve been able to promote merchants via direct PPC. None of the merchants I currently promote allow this any longer (or if they do I’m not in their closed group!). Having been around affiliate marketing for a few years has definately given me an advantage as the barriers to entry have risen behind me with various new rules from both search engines and merchants about how we can promote our affiliate wares.
I think if I were starting out now and having to deal with not being able to use my old testing methods I’d probably do bags of research and start up 4 or 5 sites using the micro approach above staggering launch for each (say one every 4 to 6 weeks), sending PPC to test the products, and then giving priority for further development to whichever one showed most promise whilst also still moving forward with the others. In all good conscience though, I’m not at all sure I can advise anyone to jump right in and do that. I’d do it, but should you? It could just be a recipe for a lot of time wasted if the effort is not correctly applied. So if we want to talk about what YOU should do rather than me, I’d say… do one site first and see what you learn from that.
2. Shorter answer here – YES. But (and you had to know that was coming) that really does depend on your abilities as a marketer. Your skills in writing and site building mean you’re off to a good start. However there are so many variables that come down to your own mindset that it’s difficult for me to give and answer you can rely upon. Some people make a good living within a few weeks, others take a few years. Where you fall is entirely down to your own levels of effort and intuition about what people might buy and how you can effectively target them when they’re doing it.
One thing that is guaranteed: – People who work hard at anything rarely walk away empty handed. Keep focused, keep trying, and do not give up when you have your first disaster!
April 9th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Like Kirsty I’ve watched the barriers to entry go up behind me so it’s certainly not getting any easier to break into affiliate marketing.
Ben says he has good writing skills and knows how to put websites together so to answer his question about collecting together a loads of articles before publishing I would say get them online NOW and spread the content across as many niche sites as you feel you can maintain and your content naturally covers – a handful at most for starters though.
While they’re online use your research to experiment with the sites you have made and see what happens.
You will learn a helluva lot more from what did and didn’t work by doing something – procrastination will get you nowhere.
One other point about going niche or developing a larger site which applies specifically to new affiliates is that they will find it hard to get approved for all the merchants needed to build a site promoting 100′s of merchants from scratch – so you’re pretty much forced to go niche. However, once you have a track record and the networks know who you are it gets easier. Good Luck!
April 9th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
While I have nowhere near as experience as Kirsty, I started out after many of these walls had come down so I thought I would chuck in my two pennies worth.
From my experience I would definitely go down the lots of niche sites route. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly for almost every site I have, Google seems to stage indexing; it initially visits your site quite a few times, then it stabilises until about 6 months when, depending on the amount of content, it really ramps up the number of visits and the number of pages indexed – for example a site I started in September saw the number of pages indexed in March treble after no real growth for months. So get more sites up and running while waiting for Google to decide it “likes” your sites and put you somewhere you can gain traffic from the SERPS….which means if you want it to be ready for Xmas then get started now!
By the time 6 months rolls around you should have a few sites out there in the big bad world. The next step is to work out which to build out, so don’t get too attached to your sites – some sites will work, some will not. Do not be fooled into thinking more work will turn around your poor performers, it might, but the line of least resistance is to build out the ones that do work as you are more likely to be rewarded for your efforts there. The truth is that your initial effort is going into finding those profitable niches as much as it is making money really, so once you find them – make maximum use!
Also follow Kirsty’s advice from a previous post and when you find a niche that works build out not only your site but similar ones and really exploit it. For example if you are selling Manchester United stuff, start an Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool site, don’t go and start a designer furniture site! Doing this allows you to leverage the site(s) you already have to promote your new one with links from a respected source in a related niche (and one that your competitors cannot use!) and make further use of your hard earned knowledge of the niche.
Lastly if you find that you are getting traffic but not converting well, experiment with other ways to make money on your content. For example I found that on some sites that were not getting the conversions, when I ran Adsense alongside the affiliate offers it made a better overall return. This is particularly true for niches that show a high CPC on Google Adwords tool.
When I started I had sites covering all manner of niches. I have now got 3 main areas I cover (forgive me if I do not tell you what they are!!) and have plans to build out more in these areas, which means I can plan to buy domain names, commission content etc as I am now confident the investment will be worthwhile. When I started I had done research and went into areas I thought may be profitable but most of the ones at the top of my list proved to be red herrings, whereas others became mini-goldmines – you just do not know which will be good until you actually get some hard data.
Currently I do not draw a salary from any of this, all my profit goes back into building out the sites, promotion etc as I want to get a good level of safety before I rely on this as my sole source of income!
Oh and on a technical note, I use the ever wonderful WordPress with wp-hives so I can run several sites from one installation, which makes maintenance a lot easier and means you can run more sites.
Hope my experience of the last couple of years helps…
April 9th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
Wow, thanks to Matt and Joe for chipping in with those words of wisdom and experience. Great bits of information!
I was quite worried about saying to Ben to definately try lots of sites as I know a lot of people can get mired in building lots but never completing any. However I can’t see any other way around testing lots of niches other than building thin affiliate sites and chucking some PPC at them (not wise at all for a beginner!)
April 10th, 2010 at 7:45 am
My two pennies worth – listen to Google and make full use of their webmaster tools and analytics. Get the onpage stuff in place from the beginning, it will then, become second nature to write content with all the SEO factors in place.
Check the ‘Keywords’ in WMT, is Google seeing what you hope it’s seeing? Use analytics to check your most popular pages and keywords – can you build on these? are there keywords which need a bit of tweaking? pages that could do better? And don’t forget Google Keyword Tool for finding those keywords and phrases which might just turn out to be gold!!
April 10th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Thanks very much for your time answering this Kirsty, and for the advice above. The hard work on affilaite marketing is starting this week – will come back and let you know how I get on!
April 11th, 2010 at 9:45 am
Funny.. the main piece of advice I would use if I was starting out again is ‘don’t spread yourself too thin!’
There are countless opportunities out there and it is tempting to get starry eyed and target every single one of them – but the sites that really succeed are the ones that get both a huge investement of time, and a fair bit of money spend on them for marketing purposes.
If you launch 15 ‘niche’ sites they are quite likely to be 15 crap sites, none of which will reach the potential you were aiming for. Plus the mistakes you make will be duplicated over every site. 2 or 3 perhaps is alright to get some feedback, then once they are doing well you may wish to start expanding, but not before.
April 12th, 2010 at 1:35 am
Ben – not a worry I hope your affiliate journey goes well.
Johnny – Yes, it’s the advice I’d normally give too. However, as the question was “what would you do if YOU were starting out again” I felt I should say how I would approach it personally.
I did say in the answr I wasn’t at all sure Ben should charge in right at the start and do what I’d do as you really do need to have had a practise run / analyse.
“It could just be a recipe for a lot of time wasted if the effort is not correctly applied”
April 12th, 2010 at 9:57 am
Kirsty – I was more replying to the comments.. but I know its a major mistake I made that resulted in much slower progress and definitely what *I* would do differently if I started again
April 15th, 2010 at 5:01 am
I do agree with Kirsty (I know, I am teacher’s pet!) as the problem I found with just concentrating on one or two sites is that you have no idea if the niche they target will be profitable or not and wading into a large scale site is hard to manage (time management not being my strong suit!) and visualise how to fit it all together to start with. This was the route I first took and I found I was doing “stuff” and getting nowhere, which goes to Jonny’s “do not spread yourself too thin”!
I have found to work for me is to initially target a small niche. You can do this with about half a dozen to a dozen well written pieces and some promotion (I tend to go down the linkbuilding road more than PPC) as you can then make headway pretty quickly as the competition is not so hot.
I do totally agree that you need to focus and get sites finished and I found small sites are easy to focus on and get “done”. Then, once you have got them built you can start promoting them with link building/PPC as this will give you a good place to practice your skills with these without breaking your back or the bank!
I also agree that they should not be crap, simply small and focussed. It also means that if you mess it up you have not wasted much time and you can experiment cheaply and get your structures sorted (as per Elaine’s comments).
As you get more confident you can attack larger niches and the small niche sites you started with will give you some initial links to start your larger site.
This approach is simply the one I have found to work for me and as you can tell from the comments here there are lots of other approaches people have taken/ideas. So I think the moral of this story is that any approach has strengths and weaknesses. So my advice is take what you think makes the most sense and tailor it to suit you. Whichever route you follow, Jonny’s words about taking a lot of time and effort are very true!
All that leaves is to say “good luck Ben”!