Right so chances are this thread will end up tapering off by early January because I have lots of shit to do then (IF it lasts that long) but i'll try my best to keep it updated. This is mainly to keep me accountable as I've been fucking around online too much recently and spending far too much time in STS.
I'm pretty much bust right now, have £2000 in my bank, no 9-5 job and have to obviously pay expenses in my life. I could probably last to march on that + selling some of my stuff (Hobo with laptop). Finding it extremely hard to get a job right now because my city is fairly heavily financially based, has a lot of unemployment and really doesn't like recruiting young people because we aren't seen as "respectable" yet. Also my current broken nose is making it even more impossible to get a job. I WILL continue trying to get one though because realistically things might not go my way. Perhaps with my back against the wall I might get lucky though!
My father has written a book that he plans to sell as an ebook and this has inspired me to write my own. Not an original idea i'm aware but I guess with enough marketing/ effort/ going niche/ optimisation of sales page then it could work out. The niche is a fairly common one for affiliate marketers unfortunately (think business, health, self improvement etc) however I do actually have a good knowledge of the information i'm giving and I KNOW that the person will succeed if they follow the damn book. Also it's something that anyone really can do.
My aim is to settle in the niche and in the near future, allow affiliates to promote it.
Just a bit of thought process/ action process below:
- ebook is pretty good tbh, takes a LOT of info and gives a good summary. Me two years ago would have bought this from me if I had known what it would have been like. Got a photoshopped cover and all. Like 20-25 pages with a couple of bonus bits.
- Targeting UK customers as there is a slightly easier market here/ more searches than US for some terms
- Bought .co.uk domain name off namecheap. keywordnoun.co.uk. Think investmentbase.co.uk or something along those lines where 'investment' is a common theme in my website (thats a shitty example obviously).
- Made a big list of keywords and their UK traffic in a spreadsheet. Narrowed down the list to buying keywords "buy, cheap, fast, quick, now" etc. Ran SerpIQ on the ones with >200 monthly traffic (<3 dchuk). Narrowed that list further down to ones with SerpIQ under 50. Left me with 10 keywords. The main one (for now) I will be targeting fits very well with my domain name and ebook and sounds like it has quite a bit of ecommerce intent. This is just a primary one to start getting the sales off the ground. There is also a more general less-ecommerce intent sounding one with about 60k searches a month I will target when I get bigger (just want to go for quality, targeted traffic for now!).
Keyword
UK Traffic: 1600 Monthly
SerpIQ: 45
I guess i can end up with a few sales from this. Enough to fund some more adwords bids.
- I will be running adwords on a large list (Maybe 150?) of low volume keywords + the keyword above. Aim at spending as little as possible per day but spend enough per keyword to give me a high CTR rate. Set £5 daily limit for now (lol). Don't want to lose all my adwords cash before i've had time to optimise my sales page.
- I've sorted each keyword into groups so that the ad's are fairly targeted. Just started the adwords ads this morning, most have quality scores of 6/7. Hopefully that will improve when my CTR improves, if not then i'll do some more sorting.
- Most of the ads i've put a max cpc as £0.4. Those that needed higher i've paused, those with poor quality scores, i've paused.
- Got a £75 adwords voucher on google. Once i've spent the £25 I put in, I should get.
- Adwords data says no clicks/ impressions today but it's lying. Analytics says 95 hits. I fucked up though and only like 5 were from the UK (rest from US, France, Germany and Canada. Guess they won't like the '£' sign?).
- Got an HTML template, edited it. Looks very clean and simple. Fairly short sales page but less like a long letter and more like a product sales page (e.g. includes things like two rows of three columns that have the selling points of the products). Doesn't have a considerable amount of text on it, maybe 600 words. Got a feeling that this is going to bite me in the ass. Got that feeling again when reading through the snippet in Ca$hvertising that says (good) long sales letters are always better than short. I suck at writing that shit though and my cash is limited to outsource (feeling at that price they would suck too). Perhaps getting my product out there now and playing around is better? Can always split test a long form sales letter later when I can outsource it.
- Made the stuff in the page fairly bland. Lots of the colours are white and grey for objects and the background. Text is black. Only colour on the website is the Secure SSL button at the top (increases conversions apparently? Only cost me $1.99 from Namecheap anyway), the picture I photoshopped of the ebook (in a hardback book form) and the buying buttons which I have said "Get this now" or something and beside it "Only 55 Left!". The colour of the book and buy buttons are orange which contrasts nicely against the background and seems a fairly active colour.
- Added the Privacy policy, terms and conditions and sitemap page on the bottom. Many suggest the first two help Quality Score.
- Added a wordpress blog and a contact page. Turned the html page into a page template in wordpress and made it the home page (very easy to do).
- Two links at the top of my lander to "Blog" and "Contact". Might remove these in the future if hurting conversions. Blog may help build authority and trust though. Also added a sale button for my product in the side bar.
- Used scarcity with the "Only XX Left!" and said the price is discount from £60 or something. Looks tacky tbh but I guess if it helps conversions ...
- The highly visible bits kind of flow like a half circle. SSL Secure badge at top, then bright orange ebook below and this leads down (and back towards the left of the page) to the bright orange buy button. Thought if the eye is naturally drawn to this curve it could end up well.
- Optimised whole website for speed. All is pretty fast. Thinking of using a CDN (Advice on cloudflare?) as a near 100 score would be nice eventually.
- Put the price about £29. Better in £ I think since i'm targeting the UK crowd. Also $46 always seems like more than £29 to me (number is bigger!). Will obviously do some tests of price in the future but I certainly don't have the traffic for now.
- Signed up to e-junkie and uploaded my e-book in pdf form. Started a new paypal account for the business.
- Will be tracking people with analytics. I have a thank-you page set up on my site. They get redirected to this after paypal takes the money. Also set this up as a goal. Only concern is that people might exit before they get redirected to the page (takes a good few seconds due to paypal).
- Set up clicking on a buy button as an event. Made this event a goal. Should help to see how many people I lose when buying the product on paypal.
- Did a test of buying my ebook at £0.01. All worked well, showed up in analytics the next day.
- Connected e-junkie to aweber to build a list from customers. Unfortunately it requires double opt-in for that but better than nothing. That might help in the future (if I can churn one out in 15 hours, should be able to make others to up-sell in the future).
- Added my sites to google and bing webmaster tools. Site is now indexed in Google. Still haven't built a single link.
- Added my first post to the blog. Did about 500 words of quite good quality info but fairly bad structure and no photo.
- Currently testing proxies on scrapebox. Gonna scrape the first 1k results for maybe 1k list of related keywords. Looking for all related blogs. Will then do a pr check on domain. I'll store those that are PR1 or less in a separate file for now (might be useful later) and the other ones I will sort highest rank to lowest. Will then make good comments related to the post with my website as the anchor and a random name in the name field (Not sure I want to put my name hundreds of times and have 100% anchors to my site as my name). Might churn out 5-10 of these every while before I get seriously bored.
- Started a twitter account. Remembered I suck at twitter.
To do:
- Add a newsletter to blog?
- Write some more god-damn blog posts
- Build some more comment links
- Get logo for website/ twitter/ facebook
- See if there are any suitable rich snippets to add??
- Make a favicon
- Mobile site (far in the future)
- Get facebook page
- Increase spending on adwords
- Having to choose between Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer for A/B testing. Probably will go with Optimizely instead of VWO as people say its more noob friendly and they have a cheaper beginner package.
- Should I be using anything like Prosper202? Not exactly sure what it does tbh and I don't control the checkout page (Paypal does).
- A bit of on-page needed
Holy shit how long is this post! Any advice would be appreciated. Sorry for the broken english note-form.
EDIT: Adwords is now showing 40 impressions (Under reporting but I imagine ill see the rest tomorrow), 2.5% CTR (thats only 1 click lol), average cost £0.30 and average position = 1.1.
I'm pretty much bust right now, have £2000 in my bank, no 9-5 job and have to obviously pay expenses in my life. I could probably last to march on that + selling some of my stuff (Hobo with laptop). Finding it extremely hard to get a job right now because my city is fairly heavily financially based, has a lot of unemployment and really doesn't like recruiting young people because we aren't seen as "respectable" yet. Also my current broken nose is making it even more impossible to get a job. I WILL continue trying to get one though because realistically things might not go my way. Perhaps with my back against the wall I might get lucky though!
My father has written a book that he plans to sell as an ebook and this has inspired me to write my own. Not an original idea i'm aware but I guess with enough marketing/ effort/ going niche/ optimisation of sales page then it could work out. The niche is a fairly common one for affiliate marketers unfortunately (think business, health, self improvement etc) however I do actually have a good knowledge of the information i'm giving and I KNOW that the person will succeed if they follow the damn book. Also it's something that anyone really can do.
My aim is to settle in the niche and in the near future, allow affiliates to promote it.
Just a bit of thought process/ action process below:
- ebook is pretty good tbh, takes a LOT of info and gives a good summary. Me two years ago would have bought this from me if I had known what it would have been like. Got a photoshopped cover and all. Like 20-25 pages with a couple of bonus bits.
- Targeting UK customers as there is a slightly easier market here/ more searches than US for some terms
- Bought .co.uk domain name off namecheap. keywordnoun.co.uk. Think investmentbase.co.uk or something along those lines where 'investment' is a common theme in my website (thats a shitty example obviously).
- Made a big list of keywords and their UK traffic in a spreadsheet. Narrowed down the list to buying keywords "buy, cheap, fast, quick, now" etc. Ran SerpIQ on the ones with >200 monthly traffic (<3 dchuk). Narrowed that list further down to ones with SerpIQ under 50. Left me with 10 keywords. The main one (for now) I will be targeting fits very well with my domain name and ebook and sounds like it has quite a bit of ecommerce intent. This is just a primary one to start getting the sales off the ground. There is also a more general less-ecommerce intent sounding one with about 60k searches a month I will target when I get bigger (just want to go for quality, targeted traffic for now!).
Keyword
UK Traffic: 1600 Monthly
SerpIQ: 45
I guess i can end up with a few sales from this. Enough to fund some more adwords bids.
- I will be running adwords on a large list (Maybe 150?) of low volume keywords + the keyword above. Aim at spending as little as possible per day but spend enough per keyword to give me a high CTR rate. Set £5 daily limit for now (lol). Don't want to lose all my adwords cash before i've had time to optimise my sales page.
- I've sorted each keyword into groups so that the ad's are fairly targeted. Just started the adwords ads this morning, most have quality scores of 6/7. Hopefully that will improve when my CTR improves, if not then i'll do some more sorting.
- Most of the ads i've put a max cpc as £0.4. Those that needed higher i've paused, those with poor quality scores, i've paused.
- Got a £75 adwords voucher on google. Once i've spent the £25 I put in, I should get.
- Adwords data says no clicks/ impressions today but it's lying. Analytics says 95 hits. I fucked up though and only like 5 were from the UK (rest from US, France, Germany and Canada. Guess they won't like the '£' sign?).
- Got an HTML template, edited it. Looks very clean and simple. Fairly short sales page but less like a long letter and more like a product sales page (e.g. includes things like two rows of three columns that have the selling points of the products). Doesn't have a considerable amount of text on it, maybe 600 words. Got a feeling that this is going to bite me in the ass. Got that feeling again when reading through the snippet in Ca$hvertising that says (good) long sales letters are always better than short. I suck at writing that shit though and my cash is limited to outsource (feeling at that price they would suck too). Perhaps getting my product out there now and playing around is better? Can always split test a long form sales letter later when I can outsource it.
- Made the stuff in the page fairly bland. Lots of the colours are white and grey for objects and the background. Text is black. Only colour on the website is the Secure SSL button at the top (increases conversions apparently? Only cost me $1.99 from Namecheap anyway), the picture I photoshopped of the ebook (in a hardback book form) and the buying buttons which I have said "Get this now" or something and beside it "Only 55 Left!". The colour of the book and buy buttons are orange which contrasts nicely against the background and seems a fairly active colour.
- Added the Privacy policy, terms and conditions and sitemap page on the bottom. Many suggest the first two help Quality Score.
- Added a wordpress blog and a contact page. Turned the html page into a page template in wordpress and made it the home page (very easy to do).
- Two links at the top of my lander to "Blog" and "Contact". Might remove these in the future if hurting conversions. Blog may help build authority and trust though. Also added a sale button for my product in the side bar.
- Used scarcity with the "Only XX Left!" and said the price is discount from £60 or something. Looks tacky tbh but I guess if it helps conversions ...
- The highly visible bits kind of flow like a half circle. SSL Secure badge at top, then bright orange ebook below and this leads down (and back towards the left of the page) to the bright orange buy button. Thought if the eye is naturally drawn to this curve it could end up well.
- Optimised whole website for speed. All is pretty fast. Thinking of using a CDN (Advice on cloudflare?) as a near 100 score would be nice eventually.
- Put the price about £29. Better in £ I think since i'm targeting the UK crowd. Also $46 always seems like more than £29 to me (number is bigger!). Will obviously do some tests of price in the future but I certainly don't have the traffic for now.
- Signed up to e-junkie and uploaded my e-book in pdf form. Started a new paypal account for the business.
- Will be tracking people with analytics. I have a thank-you page set up on my site. They get redirected to this after paypal takes the money. Also set this up as a goal. Only concern is that people might exit before they get redirected to the page (takes a good few seconds due to paypal).
- Set up clicking on a buy button as an event. Made this event a goal. Should help to see how many people I lose when buying the product on paypal.
- Did a test of buying my ebook at £0.01. All worked well, showed up in analytics the next day.
- Connected e-junkie to aweber to build a list from customers. Unfortunately it requires double opt-in for that but better than nothing. That might help in the future (if I can churn one out in 15 hours, should be able to make others to up-sell in the future).
- Added my sites to google and bing webmaster tools. Site is now indexed in Google. Still haven't built a single link.
- Added my first post to the blog. Did about 500 words of quite good quality info but fairly bad structure and no photo.
- Currently testing proxies on scrapebox. Gonna scrape the first 1k results for maybe 1k list of related keywords. Looking for all related blogs. Will then do a pr check on domain. I'll store those that are PR1 or less in a separate file for now (might be useful later) and the other ones I will sort highest rank to lowest. Will then make good comments related to the post with my website as the anchor and a random name in the name field (Not sure I want to put my name hundreds of times and have 100% anchors to my site as my name). Might churn out 5-10 of these every while before I get seriously bored.
- Started a twitter account. Remembered I suck at twitter.
To do:
- Add a newsletter to blog?
- Write some more god-damn blog posts
- Build some more comment links
- Get logo for website/ twitter/ facebook
- See if there are any suitable rich snippets to add??
- Make a favicon
- Mobile site (far in the future)
- Get facebook page
- Increase spending on adwords
- Having to choose between Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer for A/B testing. Probably will go with Optimizely instead of VWO as people say its more noob friendly and they have a cheaper beginner package.
- Should I be using anything like Prosper202? Not exactly sure what it does tbh and I don't control the checkout page (Paypal does).
- A bit of on-page needed
Holy shit how long is this post! Any advice would be appreciated. Sorry for the broken english note-form.
EDIT: Adwords is now showing 40 impressions (Under reporting but I imagine ill see the rest tomorrow), 2.5% CTR (thats only 1 click lol), average cost £0.30 and average position = 1.1.
