Stat Update & Some Thoughts
Time to update again. As I said in a previous post, I anticipated earning $300 from EPN for May and I am happy to say that I am currently on track for doing just that.
Halfway through the month I have had 5,200 clicks with my total commissions at $189. Hopefully this trend will continue. Despite stating a number of times that I am going to finally promote my eBay sites I still haven’t done any promotion for these sites. My best performing Mony Tree site earned $99 (from 3 sales) a couple of days ago, which is definitely my best day yet. I have not had an ACRU (new eBay registration) for the month, which is a little odd. These numbers are certainly nothing big, but I am personally esctatic that I’ve done as well as I’ve done this month without doing any promotion and without a $25 ACRU. This brings me to the reason I haven’t promoted my eBay sites.
Prior to building eBay stores I built traditional content sites monetized with AdSense. I still do this when I find a great niche. About two years ago I bought a domain name with the intent on building a content site. I knew absolutely nothing about keyword research, competition analysis or anything else. The only thing I really did know is that Google apparently pays $5+ per click in this financial niche many “gurus” claimed it really is easy. I put the site up and waited for the money to roll in. Of course it never did because the primary keyword the original site targeted has 200,000,000 exact match (search with quotes) competing pages in Google. Lesson learned.
In January of this year I completely overhauled the site. I did extensive keyword and competition research, had 10 high quality articles written and built the site. I promoted it using article marketing (only 3 articles submitted), directory submissions, bookmarking demon & 3WayLinks. I didn’t even think about the site after doing this and forgot to keep up with the stats etc. Well last week my AdSense took a huge jump and it came from this site. Previously the site hadn’t earned $0.01, and suddenly it started earning $8-10 per day. Come to find out the site is ranked 3rd for the primary keyword and 4th for a keyword that I wasn’t actually targeting. This keyword has 180,000,000 competing pages! I still can’t believe it. This is my greatest SEO achievement to-date. This really got me off track a bit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Once I saw my AdSense at that level (which is still weak compared to many), I couldn’t bear to lose the rankings so I started an extensive article marketing campaign for the site in an effort to retain the current rankings and to rank for some of the other keywords. After all, the money I earn from Google & eBay funds the expansion/scaling of my business $10 / day is an extra $300 to use for content etc.
Josh Spaulding released a free report called the $5 Formula (which has an in-depth article marketing strategy). The report does require you to opt-in, but it is absolutely worth it. I don’t receive anything for recommending it. I have implemented the strategy with the site discussed above and now believe every word of the report. Grab it here if you’re interested:
That is really all for now.
Regards,
Transition from Commission Junction to eBay Partner Network
As most everyone should know by now eBay decided to bring their affiliate program in-house and left Commission Junction. Affiliates were given until the end of the month to change links to the new network. I contemplated on waiting until the last week of the month to ensure all the kinks were worked out, but after another member of Mony Tree made a sale and said that everything is tracking well I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and change all my sites (11 total, 10 Mony Tree and 1 BANS). I made the change on April 5th
The actual process of changing the sites, both Mony Tree and BANS, from CJ to EPN was absolutely painless. Thanks to the hard work by the staff at MT and BANs, all that was required on my end was to change the unique ID for each site. I had all 10 of my sites changed within 15 minutes.
So, I am a stat junkie and of course logged into my EPN account 5 or 6 times the first day to make sure it was tracking properly. The first day I didn’t notice any clicks at all but was told that it takes a while for the system to update. Long story short, today is the 4th day since I made the change and clicks appear to be tracking fine (568 clicks in 4 days). I haven’t made a sale yet though! So we shall see.
These sites are always lagged a bit due to the nature of the auctions on eBay. The only way to receive an immediate commission from one of these sites is if the visitor to your sites uses “Buy it now” or if they win a 1 day auction (not many 1 day auctions). So according to my stats I should hopefully see some sales come in over the next few days.
I will post an update soon.
Regards,
Mony Tree - Are You Doing This Too?
Many of you know that I have on the eBay Store bandwagon since the beginning of the year. I regret not starting building these sites before then. I have a total of 8 stores up and my commission junction account has just under $500 in it, all from Feb through today. This is hands down the quickest I have profited from new sites ever. The conversion rate of these sites blows me away more than anything. Not one of my 8 sites averages more than 40 unique visitors per day, yet I’ve already made a decent amount from them. I can only imagine what will happen once I really start promoting these sites. My goal at this point is to build two more and the focus on doing nothing but promotion for the next month or so.
Really, if you’re trying to make a go at affiliate marketing and you aren’t building these sites you are really missing out. If you are considering it, I do recommend that you wait until early April after eBays move away from Commission Junction is complete. For those of you that don’t know by now, eBay is bringing their affiliate program in house and severing the relationship with CJ.
My preference for building these sites is hands down Mony Tree. As I said in a previous post, I have used both Build a Niche Store and Mony Tree and have really always preferred Mony Tree. I now prefer it even more. Let me give you an example of why I think Mony Tree is the best option. Most of you know by now that Google decided to create a new policy requiring every website with Google Ads on it have a privacy policy (headache for those of us with many sites). As soon as I found out about this new policy, I notified the members and staff at Mony Tree of the policy change. Within 6 hours of my posting the staff at Mony Tree added a privacy policy to every site in the Mony Tree system. I didn’t have to do anything! That was a huge relief and one of the reasons eBay’s affiliate program change doesn’t concern me at all. I really have countless examples just like this. If I ever make a suggestion to the Mony Tree site, they take it to heart and if possible implement it.
Lastly, the absolute best feature of Mony Tree is the speed/efficiency in which you can put up a fully customized site, with a 100% unique custom header. You can put a BANS site up just as fast, but to put one and and customize it fully takes about 10 times as long as it does with Mony Tree. The only disadvantage Mony Tree has going for it is the monthly fee. With that said, I made more than 2 months fees within the first month. The first month is completely free. So I have been cash flow positive from the start. If you’re on the fence, you should at least give them a shot and take advantage of their 30 day free trial. If you do sign up and have any questions feel free to ask me via email or on the forum.
Regards,
Niche Marketing Case Study - Keyword Sniping, Article Marketing & SEO
Below you will find the details of my first Niche Marketing Case Study. This case study utilizes pretty basic internet marketing tactics (article marketing) and a tactic I learned from Courtney Tuttle at the Internet Marketing School called “Keyword Sniping“. This tactic isn’t new and I originally read the Keyword Sniping article about 3 or 4 months ago. Finally, throughout this case study I will implement all other SEO tactics I have learned throughout the past couple of years (again, nothing earth shattering here).
Domain Name: http://www.remotedatabackup.info
Domain Age: Less than 1 month
Site Creation: The site was created using Wordpress and a handful of SEO related plugins (namely SEO All In One)
Monetization: Monetized via an affiliate offer for an online backup service.
The one thing missing from most of my internet marketing efforts is consistency, i.e. recurring income. During the peak of my efforts in the fall of 2006 I earned around $1,000 for the month, which was a definite high for me. That required significant, and more important, ongoing effort.
For this case study I have decided to promote an affiliate program that pays a recurring income each month. I have built this site as I build all my sites so this is not another example of me losing focus.
The primary keyword for this site is obviously “remote data backup” and as you see I was able to purchase a domain that includes the primary keyword (which from my experience is certainly a SEO advantage).
The site has a static front page which includes a unique 500 word article on “Remote Data Backup“. I intend on posting a new article or two each week focusing on other, more long-tail keywords in order to attract more organic traffic.
This site will also be promoted via 3WayLinks (see: Niche Marketing Tools that Work for Me for more information), and the most extensive article marketing campaign that I have ever done (utilizing the Content Spooling Network), outsourced directory submissions and extensive social bookmarking.
Goal
My primary goal is actually not monetary. It is simply to rank in the top 10 of Google for my primary keyword and to receive a minimium of 100 unique visitors per day. Once I complete that goal I will certainly look to maximize the revenue of the site, prerrably via a recurring offer such as the one I am currently promoting.
Current Status: Not Indexed (site went live on Feb. 27)
I have high hopes for this case study, even though the primary keyword is pretty darn competitive.
Regards,
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Niche Marketing Tools
