The journals on WF have been quite motivational to me on my affiliate marketing escapades. I thought writing one myself might be a good way to keep me motivated and glean some outside perspective from those members who have a lot more motivation than I. Here we go...
My first ventures
To start, I made a clicbank and google adwords account. I found that adwords didn't support direct affiliate links so I scrapped that idea and went instead tried to advertise on Facebook. I split tested two ads in the study prep niche thinking that Facebook would have a good audience for such things. I started with a low cost per click and gradually upped it on each ad until I was getting around 10k impressions. I had very few clicks, and no conversions. I let this go for a couple weeks and decided that I would need a bigger investment to try to get more traffic and more splits test, but with such a low number of clicks and without any real experience in copywriting, I stopped this campaign and thought of a new way to make my fortune.
My next idea was to use crowd sourcing to get people to fill out lead forms from shareasale. I could pay the people $0.50 a lead and would receive upwards of $1.50. This didn't pan out as the crowd sourcing pages I used had very little membership and most of them charged more for filling jobs. I still think this could definitely work given enough people willing to fill them and a high enough paying deal, but I wanted more of a residual income source and I was also toying with the idea of Amazon Associates at the time.
Current project
At the end of October, I purchased a shared hosting account from just host, and upgraded to the slightly better server. With this, I was also given a free (lifetime?) domain name. I didn't know what products I wanted to market yet, so I used the domain as my personal blog. I then did some keyword research using Market Samurai and found a viable niche in electronics. I purchased a domain in the form of thebestproductnamereviews.com. I now know it would have been better without the stop word, but I can live with it as is. I wrote about 8 product reviews with affiliate links and put them on a wordpress blog with a professional looking theme I found. From there I got all the wordpress plugins and optimized the site as well as I could. I also paid some WF members to do some SEO work like directory submission and social bookmarking. I then made a ton of forum pages with my site in the sig and submitted my site to as many rss feed sites as I could find. During this time, I also purchased a domain of the form productnamereview.net for later.
After about a month of writing articles and doing my own SEO work, I got to the front page of google near the middle. I used analytics to track traffic and finally got my first sale. Currently, I'm up to about 13 items sold for last month. The second site is also on the front page in a similar spot for the target keyword, although I have hardly done anything with it. I was using amaniche for the second one but decided to drop that and do it like my first site.
About a week ago, I purchased scrapebox and started manually posting to high pr blogs for the first site. Not many of the backlinks are showing up yet, but hopefully it will be a trickle effect. Still getting about 30 unique vistors a day and a sale about every other day. The first site has already paid off it's domain name cost and seo work cost. That's about where I am so far.
What do you guys think? Am I going about this correctly?
My first ventures
To start, I made a clicbank and google adwords account. I found that adwords didn't support direct affiliate links so I scrapped that idea and went instead tried to advertise on Facebook. I split tested two ads in the study prep niche thinking that Facebook would have a good audience for such things. I started with a low cost per click and gradually upped it on each ad until I was getting around 10k impressions. I had very few clicks, and no conversions. I let this go for a couple weeks and decided that I would need a bigger investment to try to get more traffic and more splits test, but with such a low number of clicks and without any real experience in copywriting, I stopped this campaign and thought of a new way to make my fortune.
My next idea was to use crowd sourcing to get people to fill out lead forms from shareasale. I could pay the people $0.50 a lead and would receive upwards of $1.50. This didn't pan out as the crowd sourcing pages I used had very little membership and most of them charged more for filling jobs. I still think this could definitely work given enough people willing to fill them and a high enough paying deal, but I wanted more of a residual income source and I was also toying with the idea of Amazon Associates at the time.
Current project
At the end of October, I purchased a shared hosting account from just host, and upgraded to the slightly better server. With this, I was also given a free (lifetime?) domain name. I didn't know what products I wanted to market yet, so I used the domain as my personal blog. I then did some keyword research using Market Samurai and found a viable niche in electronics. I purchased a domain in the form of thebestproductnamereviews.com. I now know it would have been better without the stop word, but I can live with it as is. I wrote about 8 product reviews with affiliate links and put them on a wordpress blog with a professional looking theme I found. From there I got all the wordpress plugins and optimized the site as well as I could. I also paid some WF members to do some SEO work like directory submission and social bookmarking. I then made a ton of forum pages with my site in the sig and submitted my site to as many rss feed sites as I could find. During this time, I also purchased a domain of the form productnamereview.net for later.
After about a month of writing articles and doing my own SEO work, I got to the front page of google near the middle. I used analytics to track traffic and finally got my first sale. Currently, I'm up to about 13 items sold for last month. The second site is also on the front page in a similar spot for the target keyword, although I have hardly done anything with it. I was using amaniche for the second one but decided to drop that and do it like my first site.
About a week ago, I purchased scrapebox and started manually posting to high pr blogs for the first site. Not many of the backlinks are showing up yet, but hopefully it will be a trickle effect. Still getting about 30 unique vistors a day and a sale about every other day. The first site has already paid off it's domain name cost and seo work cost. That's about where I am so far.
What do you guys think? Am I going about this correctly?
