Colin answered my previous post and wanted to know how to get started, or rather how to find a niche to begin with.

Now there are numerous ways to go about this, but in this post I’ll talk about how I do this with Amazon products (since they are my favourite affiliate program).

Now while sometimes I’ll get ideas for products to promote by watching tv or reading magazines, usually my first step is to head over to amazon.com and look at their bestseller lists. They have them in nearly every department, and often you can drill down quite well too.

So for example, here is the bestseller list for Air Purifiers (Home & Garden, Vacuums, Air Purifiers). I just chose that list totally at random as it sounded cool (and let it be known that I know nothing about air purifiers LOL). http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/home-garden/267554011/ref=pd_ts_hg_nav (not an aff link).

As you can see, there are lots of different types of air purifiers to choose from, so the next thing I usually do is pick one at random. I usually like to pick something that has been in the top 100 for more than 60 days, have at least 10 customer reviews, and a four or more star rating.

Just from a quick glance, the Honeywell Air Purifiers seem very popular (lots of reviews), are a good price (so your commission will be decent) and have been around awhile (most of them more than 900 days in the top 100).

So I’d probably pick one of them (again at random) and write a unique hubpage around it.

Don’t worry too much about how much the item costs, many people will tell you to choose only products that are high priced, but I’ve promoted things as low as $10 before and still made good money (because I can sell more, and people always put more stuff in their carts at Amazon).

Then I’d repeat that for 9 other products (all in totally different categories and lists – so your next one might be a baby product, and other might be a garden chair etc) and write hubs around those too until I have 10 new hubs written.

With my hubpages, I’ll write a 300-400 unique post usually review style just talking about the product. I often will read customer reviews and reword this when writing my hub. Add a picture of the product top left and underneath it place your affiliate link directly to Amazon in a link capsule. Also in the first paragraph of the article, as a text link, I’ll also place a link to the product on Amazon. (You are only allowed two links – so keep it as one in the first para of the article, and the other under the picture in a link capsule).

At the end of the article I’ll also place a hubpage Amazon capsule too (you only get revenue share with hubpages with the capsule, so don’t put it at the top).

Once you’ve done all 10, sit back and wait a week.

At the end of one week you need to identify which hub got the most views, was ranked the highest and (fingers crossed) made you some sales. (Although to be realistic, most hubs don’t start earning until after a month or two).

Once you’ve identified your best item, this is what you are going to build a site around. Buy a generic domain name and get some hosting. I like using wordpress blogs, but you can use static hmtl sites too – makes absolutely no difference in ranking in my experience.

Let’s say your best performing product was about a lawnmower. Don’t think mini site, think authority site, with lots of different reviews and articles about lawnmowers. So perhaps you want to buy lawnmowerblog.com (no idea if it’s available). Try and get your main generic keyword in there if you can (it’ll be hard to get exact match so be creative – toplawnmowerreviews.com, thelawnmowerwebsite.com, ilovelawnmowers.com – you get the idea).

For the next 30 days write one post/review to your blog every day, and write one article to submit to ezinearticles.com (you can also add the eza article to your blog as well if you like).

Within a month you’ll be earning some sweet sweet cash. Most of your traffic at this time will be coming from ezinearticles, but over time your backlinks will build up too and you’ll get google traffic as well.

Oh and don’t forget to add a link to your new blog from that old hubpage as well. Once your site is established, then you can go and get some more backlinks for it if you like. Or you can repeat the above steps with a new site.

Hope that’s helped!

Tracey

After a comment by James a few days ago about what he recommended that I would tell a newb about earning money online I haven’t been able to get the question out of my head.

At the time I just answered with the typical – focus on one thing, take action – answer (which I still believe to be true), but is this really enough for a someone new who doesn’t even know WHAT they want to focus on or HOW to take action.

Do I take it for granted that new players know enough of the basics to get started, or do I need to go back to grass roots here and hand hold them with keyword research, setting up a blog/hubpage, and ways to get backlinks and/or traffic?

I have a feeling that I (not deliberately mind you) leave out a lot of the puzzle when I tell people how to make money online.

So tell me… if you are a new marketer who hasn’t yet starting earning anything (or not much) online, what DO you need help with?

I just got a comment from Stephanie asking about what I do to make money online, and as I started to reply it turned into a massive answer so I’ve decided to make it a post instead of replying to her comment. Enjoy.

Tracey,
I think I’ve read just about every word on your site – but sorry if these answers appeared somewhere else already. Do you have any opinion on the Postrunner system? Are you still finding success with creating your own Web 2.0 backlinks (not counting Hubpages and Ezines)? There is just so much info – not sure where to focus. Creating 2.0s? Angela and Paul’s backlinks? Postrunner? Or all?
I’d really like to focus my efforts to get the best results.
Thanks
Stephanie

Hi Stephanie,

Glad to hear you are enjoying my site. Let’s see if I can answer your questions:

1. re: Postrunner System

I’m not a member of the Keyword Academy anymore so don’t exactly know what this system does. I think it’s a form of guest posting on other people’s blogs through the one system thereby distributing your articles to lots of different places online to gain backlinks, am I right?

If so then yes I believe that this can be very powerful. It’s not what I do, but it can work very well if you don’t have many of your own sites online yet.

Because I have quite a few sites of my own now, I usually use them to get backlinks to my other sites. I also use web 2.0 properties for links as well.

2. Success with web 2.0 properties?

I definately do use web 2.0 sites a lot because they work great for me. I mainly use hubpages and ezinearticles, but also occassionaly squidoo, xomba, infobarrel, snipsly, weebly, blogger and others. Don’t ignore the power of these properties – especially ones that you can directly control. I have one hubpage that is a pr5. A link from that page is VERY powerful.

3. Angela & Pauls backlinks

I don’t use these anymore. Twelve months ago they were super powerful but now because so many people (newbies) use them they have lost all their link power. I also think during the last Mayday update Google gives less juice to these types of links. Plus it’s a pain to fill out all those profiles

4. What to do now?

I like to keep my system pretty simple. I believe it’s really just a numbers game. The more pages/articles you have online the more money you’ll make.

My basic system is slightly different depending on what I’m promoting.

For Amazon sites, it’s usually set up a blog or html static site (which one depends on my mood for that day, it really makes no difference to rankings). I try and get a close match domain name like redwidgets.com although sometimes it’s more general (tip: if you are having trouble getting a good domain name just add a generic word to the end. I like adding blog or site or something, so redwigdgetsblog.com.)

Next I check Google Adwords for a good main keyword. Usually it’s something with three words in it because it’s less competition.

Next I’ll do a search for that keyword online. On the left of Google search if you click advanced options, you’ll see a wonder wheel option. Click that. The related phrases that appear are usually my secondary keywords for the site (and I’ll create a page/post for each of these).

Usually my amazon sites have around six to ten content pages (or more if they are very profitable).

Now depending on whether they ranking and if they are making sales or not, I’ll then add a few hubpages and articles pointing back to the sites. These are not always related. I might have hubs on cat breeding that link to sites about lego star wars. If it’s related then great, but don’t think it definately has to be.

Oh and another tip: always add an outbound link or two to a relevant authority site. It actually helps your own site! I didn’t beleive it either until I tried it, but it really works.

For my Adsense sites, it’s roughly the same except I have way more posts on these sites. Usually I try and get AT LEAST 30 posts on these sites but many of my sites have more than 100 pages. The posts/pages target lots of different keyphrases (please don’t try and target just the one phrase with these sites, you want them to look as authorative as possible).   Tip: do a search for your keyphrase on Google then advanced options again and just look at either News or Blogs – there is some really good fresh information you can use on your blogs that is topical and gives your site some really good articles.

Definately add some tracking to your sites (I usually use Google Analytics, but sometimes I’ll use Statcounter instead). See what keywords that Google thinks that your site is relevant for and then write some more posts on that.

Adsense sites definately need more support in terms of articles and web 2.0 sites linking to them. I lot of my traffic to my adsense sites comes from ezinearticles.

I don’t have as much luck with Clickbank as I find many of the products don’t convert well for me. My best strategy is usually to do a case study, full review website covering a product (that I’ve actually used!) giving my results and experiences with the product. Can be time consuming, but ranks so much better in Google than just have a one page review that every other affiliate does. Plus it gives me credibility because I actually do use these products.

That is really all I do. As you can see it’s not complicated, it’s just a matter of lots of writing (either posts or articles) that I spread over the web either on my own site, or for backlinks on other sites.

I don’t use any special software, I do everything by hand. (I’ve played with autoblogging before as I have WPRobot but I just don’t seem to make any money this way). I only make money when I sit down and do the hard work. Writing Writing Writing.

So there you go. My big secret to making money online. And you probably knew this already.

After reading Dave’s very funny 27 Reasons post, I was inspired to write my own numbers post so in an effort to kill an half an hour or so, here it is. 19 Reasons Why You Should Never Write a Numbers Post:

1.   Google doesn’t know how to count. He (she?) is very good at reading for keywords, but couldn’t care less if you wrote a list of numbered paragraphs or lists. He (she) only cares about the words.

2.  Bloggers care deeply about numbers posts and we all know that other bloggers don’t buy stuff from you. People searching online do. People searching online don’t give a hoot if you have one thing on your list or 9 things.

3.  I know this because I’ve had posts that have promoted one thing, and other’s that promote a bunch of things in a list with titles like ‘top 5 ..’ and ‘the 7 bestselling ..’. They don’t make any difference to my sales.

4. Experts tell you that if you are writing a number post or article then it has to be odd numbered. ‘ 5 ways to ..’, ‘7 secrets ..’, ‘19 reasons why ..’, etc. They cite examples based on marketing data they’ve read. Something about physiological barriers or something. Again having numbered articles doesn’t make a difference to how you rank in the search engines.

5. I’m loving the show CougarTown right now. It’s hilarious. Ellie is my favourite character. I seriously love this show.

6. Often times some of the points in a numbers post don’t seem to have any relevance to what it is supposed to be about and are there just as filler content. See point 5.

7. Of course, we know that Google doesn’t care about numbers but human readers do. So sometimes writing an article about the ‘11 magic secrets to ruling the world’ may get you more clicks on your article.

8. While the above has worked on ezinearticles that I’ve written, it doesn’t seem to affect my CTR to my site though. Therefore, while you might get more readers looking at your article, it doesn’t always translate to clickthroughs and therefore sales on your site.

9. Once you get to point 9, you start to struggle about things to write about to keep your list going.

10. Have you seen the flirting between Alyssa Milano and The Old Spice Guy on YouTube. Very funny stuff.

11. If you are serious about making money online then you should stay away from sites like YouTube because it’s a major time sucker, and the time you spent watching video’s could have been spent writing articles and earning you money.

12. Same goes for reading other blogs from your favourite bloggers.

13. And hanging out at forums.

14. Yep, all major time suckers which could have been used to spend time writing articles.

15. Have I got to 19 yet?

16.

17. There really was something really cool at point 16, but it’s invisible and it will only appear at midnight on the 2nd of May 2067.

18. Ok, that last point wasn’t even funny. You can see I’m struggling to fill up all 19 points here.

19. Seriously though, stop reading this stupid post and go and write some articles on your blog or submit them to ezinearticles for traffic. That will make you more money that any secrets I could ever give you in this post.

My June Results

I had the best month in June that I’ve ever had online (well since I started tracking my earnings anyway). Amazon was still by far my best earner at just over $5K, and the rest of my affiliate earnings were around $900 (my Clickbank earnings have dropped dramatically since the Google June updates). So just under $6K for the month. Not too shabby for a few hours a day onlne. My goal is to get up to $10K though. Might take a bit more work

While Amazon continues to be great, I’m not sure about the rest of my earnings because Google has dumped some of my information sites …

Google Caffeine Ranking Changes

At the beginning of June a few of my websites that had previously been getting around 100-200 visitors a day from Google suddenly dropped out of the rankings and now G is only sending me around 5-10 visitors a day. (Luckily I still get around 100 visitors a day through article marketing to these sites, but that’s not the point).

So what happened?

I suspect it was nothing that I did, but rather the dreaded MayDay changes to Google’s algorithm’s. Yes Caffeine really did shake things up for us internet marketers.

Now before we go forward, these were not tiny niche websites. They had around 50 or so pages each, all with unique content that I’d written.

So the bigger questions now is, what on earth is Google looking for now?

Now while I cannot say for sure, here are my thoughts on what I, and everyone else, should be looking at in the future.

Linking out has become important. Yes it seems that you’ll need to be more generous in your linking scheme and not try and hog all that juice for yourself. Pages where I have four or five links (even links to other pages on my own site) are doing better than pages that have no links on them. Interesting. By spreading the love, you might just be helping yourself out.

PageRank has come back into play. PR hasn’t been important for a long time but now I’m noticing that those sites that list in the top 10 for certain keywords have good PR. I’m not seeing as many tiny little sites with PR0 there anymore – they seem to have been booted out. Of course this could also be because the larger sites have more backlinks (which in turn increases PR to a site) as well.

Good internal page structure. Call it silo’ing or what you will, but sites with tidy and neat category structures seem to be doing well. I’m yet to figure out the best way to change this on existing sites, but it’s worth taking into account with new sites that you create.

Backlinks. I’m somewhat in two minds about this. On one level I hear that you no longer want 1,000’s of low quality backlinks to your site, you want good quality (preferably from high PR pages) backlinks with the anchor text of your keyword. And that doesn’t mean the PR from the domain, but from the page (unlike those spammy profile links). But I have to say that both still work for me. In fact I have two websites that support both theories. One has just a few high quality links from relevant sites, and the other has a bunch of low quality profile links. Both rank well – and they still do even after the caffeine changes, so I can’t say what I believe here.

I think I’m going to just continue building links like I usually do and see what happens.

IPK Promotion

Those on my list might have seen my last post about the fact that IPK is relaunching this month. I’ve had quite a few people want to promo it too and earn some quick cash, but don’t have a list. Is it still possible to make sales from this is you don’t have a list?

Yes it is, it’ll be a bit harder but it is possible.

I’ll be writing a blog post later this week about how to do it (and also how I’m going to do it) so you can try and get some sales as well.

Stay tuned.