This Affiliate Marketing Path

I went to check my Adsense earnings for today and noticed that I’d only gotten 17 visitors to my home improvement site so far, which is very low.  This made me very nervous - and sure that I’d dropped from my number five spot on Google - I went and checked and I’d moved up to number four - beating out a very big site!

So then I made sure that all of the pages were still indexed in Google, and sure enough they were - so I guess it’s just one of those odd things.

At least I have some other decent sites to compensate when earnings fail on others.  I guess that’s the moral for today - diversify

After trying out several different PLR subscription sites over the past year - I came to like Stefan Everaet’s Niche Content Packages the best.  They are, in my opinion, the highest quality PLR articles out there at the moment - and you also get some really great looking graphics with them.

That’s why I was excited when he recently started Niche Content Stores - ready-made, great looking affiliate stores!  I installed four over the weekend and am very excited about promoting my new sites.  They do take a little bit of work (installing - the promoting is all up to you) - you have to create the SQL databases yourself - but he gives very clear, detailed instructions on how to do this.  And it was very much worth it in my opinion.

I’ve never had an ‘affiliate store’ - so it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out, too.

This is something I do to help me get ideas for my sites.  With competition the way it is, loads of articles and link partnerships are, frankly, not cutting it like they used to.  Sure, they’ll still bring in some visitors, but if you really want to think long-term for your sites, you’ve really got to make them interesting.

For most people, coming up with great, new ideas doesn’t come easy.  But I’ve had many a good idea spring from what I had recalled seeing on other sites that I had liked in the past.

That’s why, when I see a really cool site, I first bookmark it in a folder called “Ideas & Inspiration,” then I study it, and I would recommend this for anyone looking to make quality sites that will last.

Look over the site, click around, and don’t even worry about how you can make the same types of improvements to your site - at first - because this can make it too overwhelming.   Just let it all soak in, then, after you’ve had time to think about it for about a day - go back and look at it again, and by this time it should be easier to imagine how to integrate similar things in your own sites.

It doesn’t matter if you’re inspired by the content, special features, the template, or something else - if it was something that really spoke to you, then it’s likely that it spoke to other visitors as well.  And you’d be amazed at how immersed you can become in quality if you surround yourself with it.

I realize that this is pretty late - but this fall has just been a very unproductive one, sitewise, and it’s getting very frustrating!  I had all of these things I wanted to try out and test… but they’ll have to go on the backburner for now because I have a new “job” at my FT job which requires a lot more work, I have a family member getting married,  and a family member who’s been in the hospital this month - and between it all, I just haven’t had the time I’d like to work on the sites.

Fortunately, all the work I put in in the past is still paying off (one of the best perks about this business), here are September’s earnings:

$1265.40 - Adsense
$983.46 - TLA
$36.39 - CJ
$6.25 - ClickBank
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$2291.50 = Total

As far as my home improvement site goes, it’s now up to number five on Google for its main keyword, and the competition ahead of me is fierce, so I’m going to have to come up with some very clever, hard-hitting strategies soon to bump myself up!

Here’s how it did - during this week there were still directory submissions going on and I had submitted a few articles to article sites to promote it.  Still waiting on the latest batch of 50 new articles to post to the site.

HIS Status:

#7 on Google (up one spot)
Adsense earnings for last week (9/10-9/16):  $55.60 (down $1.02 from last week)
Page impressions for last week: 1,765 (down 48 from last week)

While the visitors and earnings dropped a bit, I was still very happy to see it move up to number 7 on Google.

This past month I’ve barely touched any of my sites (!) because I’ve been so busy with my real job and family things.  But fortunately, in this field, the money keeps coming, even when I don’t have time to work on them.

The only thing that bothers me is that things are going so well lately, that I’m really afraid NOT to work on them - I guess I’d better start getting up at four in the morning again…

So, first, I’m happy to say that the main keyword for my HIS showed up on the first page of Google today!  I’m thinking that I can thank the directory submissions I bought last week for this site and the great new links I got pointing to it a few weeks ago for this.  So, here’s the update:

HIS Status:

#8 on Google (bumped up 18 spots!!!)
Adsense earnings for last week (9/3-9/9):  $56.62 (up 9.56 from last week)
Page impressions for last week: 1,813 (up 216 from last week)

August Earnings:

$866.62 - Adsense
$53.00 - “Cold Cash” from a company I don’t even remember becoming affiliated with?
$917.92 - TLA
$148.11 - CJ
$2.35 - Linkshare
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$1988 - TOTAL

Now I’m disappointed when I don’t hit $2,000!

I’m not going to spend any of this month’s earning’s on site stuff because I have so many articles that I’ve ordered that I haven’t even posted and because it’ll be nice to pay some bills down - so there will be no budget posted for now.

I hope to answer some reader comments in the next post.

This week I submitted four articles to directories to promote the site - once again, I wanted to do more, but haven’t had time lately.

Status:

#26 on Google (no change)
Adsense earnings for last week (8/27-9/2):  $47.06
Page impressions for last week: 1,597

So, I’m in the same spot on Google, but my earnings and visitors increased which is partly due to those new inbound links I recently got.

Here’s to doing more this week!

Perhaps we should call this the “weekend update” since I’m having a hard time getting it done on Fridays.

This week, I was busy in my offline life again, so the only thing I managed to get done is to submit a promotional article to four article sites and I did a bit of social bookmarking.

Here are the results:

Status:

#26 on Google (back up to the starting position)
Adsense earnings for last week (8/20-26):  $19.68
Page impressions for last week: 1,099

So, things increased by a tiny bit - but now that I’ve been paid for August I can outsource some good work for the site and hopefully things will really start picking up.

Okay, I know I was going to do these updates on Fridays - but this week I’ve been incredibly busy - both at my job and at home - so I didn’t get much done on the sites and I didn’t get to post my update here yesterday.

What I did do is suggest this site for inclusion on a very big site, and this morning, I got an email informing me that my site was included, so I’m very happy about that.  Since it was just added this morning, I don’t think it will affect the rankings yet.

I also linked to some of the internal pages of the H.I.S. from some related blogs I have - so hopefully this will do more good than harm.

Status:

#33 on Google (a 7-spot drop)
Adsense earnings for last week (8/13-19):  $19.54
Page impressions for last week: 834

So, as you can see, everything dropped since last week, but considering that I really didn’t get to touch the site in the past two weeks, I’m not too worried - let’s just hope this week proves to be more fruitful.

Woohoo!  Doesn’t that sound like a load of fun?!?

Actually, I decided to post my progress on this site not only for readers out there, but also to keep me in check with the site - I think if I set up a specific day to post details on the progress of this site - that I might get my butt in gear and not lose focus so easily.

So, here’s where things stand today -

Main keyword: #26 on Google
Adsense earnings for last week (8/6-12): 30.17
Page impressions for last week: 969

What I’m going to do this week: Submit articles to article directories, also waiting on my writer for new articles to post to the site.  May do some social bookmarking.