Danny's Climb to the Top - Progress Journal

DonegalDanny

DonegalDanny

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Jan 31, 2011
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Hi,

I've been lurking these forums for quite a while and I also had another account which I used to use to organise freelance content writing. I've been doing that via these boards on and off for two years now and as pleasant as it is, it's not what I want.

A bit on my background:

I'm a twenty year old male, dropped out of university and had to move back into my parents. I'm working part-time doing the night shift in a hotel. The rest of the time I've been doing nothing or going out partying.

I've decided it's time I got things sorted out and really get around to achieving my goal:

To no longer be working to earn money for other people, to work with myself achieving a largely passive income which I can use to fund travelling and the lifestyle I want to achieve.

I'm not totally new to affiliate marketing and all that. A couple of years ago I set up my own clickbank affiliate wordpress site and actually got a couple of sales. I lost interest as I got caught up with school-work but I learnt it was possible.

Now I'm returning to that. I've got all the time I could need, some disposable income (not enough for PPC but I can meet hosting and domain costs easy enough).

I know I could spend a lot of time thinking about what approach to take blah blah blah but I think if it's best if I take action right away.

Hopefully by writing down my goals I can force myself into real action.

And so, Today's Goal:

To build the beginning of what will be a product review site for Amazon products. I already have an affiliate account and so I need to find a product for which:

-There are not too many of these products on Amazon
-They are medium to high cost
-Medium search volume with little competition

I will probably find a .info domain for the best searched keyword I find and use hostgator to build a quick wordpress blog for it all.

I'll submit each review to Digg and install Google Analytics's.

Time to get to work, any advice is more than welcome and I'll come back here when I have the product range I'm going to target as well as the domain keyword.

Cheers

Danny
 


If I want to target a keyword, how many results can it come up with before my chances of getting to front page (with my limited resources) are nill?

Would 30,000 be the right target?

Cheers
 
Okay,

The part I'm having problems with now is seeing if a niche would be profitable or not.

What I'm looking at right now is the keyword "Garden Pond Pumps".

It gets 2,400 searches a month and that exact search on google brings up 5,290 hits.

Let's say of those results, I manage to rank high enough to get 500 hits a month.

Of those 500 hits, 10% actually click an affiliate link to Amazon and buy a product.

With an average pump cost of $30 that would bring me in $75 a month in affiliate revenue.

I suppose for a days work, that wouldn't be too bad. Am I being to liberal in my predictions here though?

Many thanks for any advice.

Danny
 
Keep at it.

How are you going about finding your target products?

::emp::
 
What I'm looking at right now is the keyword "Garden Pond Pumps".

It gets 2,400 searches a month and that exact search on google brings up 5,290 hits.
Click to expand...

Is the exact search, with quotes searched 2,400 times a month?

Let's say of those results, I manage to rank high enough to get 500 hits a month.

Of those 500 hits, 10% actually click an affiliate link to Amazon and buy a product.
Click to expand...

That number is quite high. Take about 1-4% click through completely, as you will loose people in the process.

With an average pump cost of $30 that would bring me in $75 a month in affiliate revenue.

Amazon pays 4% of revenue, for 30$, that would be 1.2$.

So with your numbers of 50 sold units per month, that would be 60$.

With my numbers of 5-20 sold units per month, that would be 6$ - 32$, which is still not shabby.

Why?

Because this is a numbers game. A basic revenue site like this can be set up in a few days, at most.

With hosting and domain name together for about 10$ a month, any site that makes more than 120$ a year makes a profit.

A strategy (including timeline) for you:

- Make 10 review sites. This should take no more than 1 month
- Review your process. (1 day)

  • What can be improved?
  • What can be automated?
  • What can you outsource?
  • What numbers do these sites bring in?
- Build 90 more sites, for a total of 100 sites.

  • Use any profits so far for outsourcing
  • This step will take about 3 months
- Let them sit and build links, SEO, web 2.0 properties, link pyramids, etc.
- After 2 months, review your properties. (we are at 1/2 year from the start now)
- Sell the 80 least profitable sites. (Pareto principle)
- Spend 1 day on each of these to make them better.

  • More articles
  • better pictures
  • nicer layout
  • etc...
So this is about 7 months.

Rinse and repeat.

::emp::
 
  • Like
Reactions: DanWesson and DBWebDev
Right now my only method to find target products is to randomly click through amazon and then check out the competition, it's very hard to find a product that doesn't have at least 2 [productname]reviews.com already, but there are some.

Wonder if there's a more effective way to find a niche though.

Yes, the exact search in quotes is that figure.

Thanks a lot for your advice there EMP.

As the traffic for these sites won't be that high then, I imagine one hostgator account could host them all? If I used .info domains that would bring the cost down too, I just wonder if .info has an adverse affect on Google rankings?

I'll report back shortly with a link to my first review site.

Cheers
 
Nothing but to do it, just make sure not to charge your credit cards and go into debt while doing this .. cash only
 
Well I've been very busy the last week or so but I've managed to get my first product review site up: Garden Pond Pumps - Information for Gardeners

I'm going to most of the review sites on that sub-domain as it will be significantly cheaper than buying a new domain each time. I'm free for the rest of the week so should be able to add more content to that site, build links, and hopefully get 3 more up before I have to go back to work on Friday.

Feels good to be taking action, even if I haven't been making as much progress as I would have liked.
 
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