I Think I’ve Got My Affiliate Marketing System Down
I’ve finally cranked out just over ten Amazon-based review sites, all of which are making me money. Even the one I just launched yesterday made me a sale overnight (it’s fun when that happens).
My system appears to be working, now I just need to keep cranking out volume and focus on volume.
I followed quite a bit of advice from Jan Roos, a pair of ladies named Paula and Wanda and other good information sources like this post from Darren Rowse.
I have also experimented quite a bit on my own by just building sites, tweaking them, watching and analyzing the traffic and working on SEO techniques.
What I have finally sort of settled on for now, at least while I’m in “scale up” mode and trying to build out more sites, is this. Here is what I go through for each site that I build and add to my network of Amazon affiliate sites:
- Keyword Research/Product Research – I use Market Samurai and Amazon to find products with great customer feedback, high prices, and good traffic. If a market looks saturated, I’ll still tackle it if a lot of traffic is there. If a market looks unsaturated but has low traffic, I’ll also go in. I compile a list of keywords I want to target along with a list of products I want to review for the site I will be building.
- Domain Registration – I often register the domain right after I have decided to move forward with the project, it pretty much always happens right after I get done with the keyword/product research and decide to tackle a market. I look for domains that include the keywords I want to target, but don’t worry too much about exact match. I try to stick with .com/.org domains.
- Review Writing – Once I know what market I want to go into after a round of research, it’s time to get writing. I take my list of products and send it to my outsourced review writer. He sends me reviews back in a couple days.
- Site Setup – Once I get my reviews back from the writer, it’s time to build the site. I use Hostmonster for hosting. I build all the sites myself, I don’t outsource site builds. I can do all the stuff listed next in less than a day, sometimes in 3-4 hours if I’m on a roll.
- When I register a domain I point it to Hostmonster nameservers right away.
- Then when I get to this point, I log into my Hostmonster cPanel and add the add-on domain. You can host many sites with one account at Hostmonster, which is pretty cool.
- I use simple scripts to install WordPress on my new domain, and then upload the Flexibility 3 theme after the WordPress install is complete. I like the Flexibility theme, some don’t. It works well for me and I feel really comfortable setting up a site with it.
- I also like to use the following plugins: Google XML sitemaps, Headspace SEO, Contact Form 7, TinyMCE Advanced and Viper’s Video Quicktags. Sometimes I’ll add a caching plugin if the site gets enough traffic down the road.
- I add all my reviews as posts.
- I add an About, Contact, Privacy/Disclaimer page
- I add a page that lists all the products that I will use as the home page
- I also add some other pages like comparison pages (if necessary)
- I like to add a couple or more blog posts and schedule them out a couple months
- I add a custom banner to the header, and change the color scheme and layout of the site using the Flexibility settings. It’s possibly to create a pretty nice looking site pretty easily with Flexibility 3, in my opinion. It’s also pretty easy to make it look like shit if you aren’t sure how to work it. Luckily my background is in web design/development.
- I set up the sidebars and footers using custom menus and WordPress widgets.
- I publish all my pages and consider it launched.
- Site Tracking – Once the site is live, I add tracking codes. I use Google Analytics and Piwik at the same time. I also set up Google Webmaster Tools for each site. I add the site to Raven Tools (I have the Pro account) and then integrate the Analytics and Webmaster Tools into Raven. I also set up all my target keywords in Raven Tools to be tracked with the Rank Tracker.
- Link Building – I like to use a combination of BuildMyRank and Backlinks Genie after launching a new site. I feel that these two give me the best mix of easy links, link diversity and quality. I’ve had great results using these two together, and it doesn’t take me much time to manage either. I even write all my own BMR posts at this point, at a pace of about 10-20 per day (takes me about 30-45 minutes only per day).
- Social Media – All I do for “social media” on my sites is link to pages every once in a while with Twitter. I have a single Twitter account that I use to promote all my sites. I find that much easier to manage than a single Twitter profile for each web site.
And that is pretty much what I’m doing at this point, and I’m trying to keep myself solely focused on rinsing and repeating the process over and over again. It’s hard to stay focused, but a little discipline can go a long way.
Tools & Services I’m Using
Without my tools, I would be in way over my head with what I’m trying to manage. All these tools make it easy to do what I’m trying to do, and save me a lot of time.
To recap the tools and services that I use currently:
- Market Samurai, the Amazon website (and sometimes Raven Tools) for research
- Raven Tools for daily monitoring and integrated tracking for all my sites
- Namecheap for domain registration
- Hostmonster for web hosting
- WordPress for site builds
- Google Analytics and Piwik for stat tracking
- BuildMyRank and Backlinks Genie for link building (read my BuildMyRank Review too)
Here’s a few opinions on each, and how they impact me:
Market Samurai – Still works pretty good, sometimes has issues but I like how it present SEO competition data and helps me find profitable keywords (rather than just high traffic keywords).
Raven Tools – This one is interesting because it integrates many other things and allows me to keep and easy eye on traffic trends. I can also easily research new keywords and manage the keywords for each site very easily.
Google Analytics – I don’t like relying on Google for much, but Analytics is great, plus it integrates with Raven Tools well. I mainly use Analytics to track traffic trends and find pages that have problems (like high bounce rates, etc.) so that I can fix them.
Piwik – I like Piwik for stat tracking, it presents data differently than Google Analytics. The main thing I use Piwik for is to identify my best converting keywords. I like the way that Piwik does that, so I’m sticking with it just for that purpose mostly.
Namecheap – Pretty decent and cheap domain registration.
Hostmonster – Cheap and decent web hosting. If you use WordPress caching plugins WordPress can handle a lot of traffic on this cheap web host. I’m hosting all my sites on one account that I pay about $58 for each 6 months. Not bad at all.
BuildMyRank – Great link building network and service, this probably has the biggest impact on my sites rankings more than anything else I do. I write 1 post per day per site (on average), and it’s working great. It doesn’t take me much time to do that at all, so I don’t bother with outsourcing it at this time.
Backlinks Genie – I want to diversify my link profile of course, so it’s not just all BMR links and other easy link targets. I use Backlinks Genie to mix in Web 2.0 links, Article links and comment links.
Daily Work
So, how much work does this take me every day?
I’m trying to keep my workload fairly simple. Here’s what I might do in a typical day.
- If I’m setting up a new site, I’ll work on that (if I have reviews in hand, domain and hosting ready to go)
- I take about 30 minutes to write BMR posts and schedule link building tasks in Backlinks Genie
- I take about 15-30 minutes to run through my sites in Raven Tools to check out traffic trends and ranking trends. I’ll often sneak in a little bit of keyword research at this point too for various sites – with the intention of looking for long tail keywords to write content around.
- I often will post 1-2 new blog posts to my sites. I rotate from site to site each day so that each site gets at least one bit of new content each 3-4 weeks. I don’t think too hard here, I just write opportunistically. What do I mean by that? Nearly all my niche review sites are based around products that I use or own, so I just write posts about my own experiences with products in the niche. One example is carpet steam cleaners. I use mine a lot to clean up after my cats so I often write posts for that niche site based on my experiences using my own steam cleaner.
- After all that is done, I will often research new ideas for new sites. My goal is to try to get 2-4 new sites done each month, sometimes more if time allows.
Usually my days consists of a quick site check in Raven Tools, writing a few BMR posts, making sure the Backlinks Genie calendar is filled with scheduled projects and reasearching/building new sites.
I think I only spend maybe 2-4 hours a day max on all of this. Not too shabby.
Once I get a portfolio of sites making a full time income, I’m guessing I’ll need to spend about the same each day to manage everything. That’s not bad at all. Now I just got to get to the point where I have enough sites and traffic to get me a full time income just from this affiliate marketing stuff. I’m getting really close.
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