Right after I arrived from my two week vacations I checked all my different money makers. And hey, I noticed that my simple niche site that I created several months ago had made me just another two sales. In just 14 days I earned $53.90, the first time that I made two sales in a single month!

Ok, but why am I telling you that? Well it’s because I finally made a descision on a new project that I’ll start soon. Since I’ve seen that niche marketing really works (even without having much worked for it), I’ll start some new niche sites over the course of the next weeks. Basically I will create 3 niche sites where I promote different Clickbank products, fill them with some content to pre-sell potential buyers and insert my CB affiliate links. So to say a landing page if you will.

Ok, but the hardest part will be to drive traffic to those sites. I will therefore use article marketing (also known as bum marketing, see my post about it), in other words writing and publishing articles on popular article directories that contain a backlink to my landing pages/niche sites. The hard part is to write articles on a daily basis for at least a month’s time. I’ve set me the goal to write 2 articles per niche site and day, so I’ll end up with 180 articles after one month. Those articles will hopefully bring in some nice traffic and sales, I only have to make sure to target the right  (long tail) keywords with enough search volume and less competition on the search engines.

The method I’ll use to make money is proven in the affiliate business, many people are making some nice cash with it. Two days ago I read an ebook from a guy that made $3000 from only 5 niche sites! He has only worked a single month to achieve these results and he’s still making cash from his sites (without writing any new articles).

Now you know what I’m about to achieve within the next weeks. I will therefore don’t have that much time to keep my blog updated as usual since I have to write 6 articles (250 to 500 words) per day. But I’ll do my best to keep you updated on what’s going on and if my new project is making me any money!

See you,
Querblogger

The last weeks I thought about making money with the eBay affiliate program. After they started their very own partner network (EPN) some weeks ago and also enabled the international usage of their program, some nice ideas came into my mind. Before that, as their program was managed by Commission Junction, I never had the chance to get accepted into their program and therefore have nearly forgotten about that possible money maker.

With the eBay partner network you earn a small percentage of each winning bid on auctions hosted on your website or blog. And you’ll also earn up to $50 for each ACRU (Active Confirmed Registered User), depending on the quality of the new referred user. With enough traffic, like in most online businesses, you may earn a lot of money from eBay.

Ok, but where to start and how? I thought about that too and I’ve already found my personal best solution. Although eBay offers different tools to develope affiliate sites for free, I’d rather choose a software called PHPBayPro to create my eBay affiliate websites. The software comes in different versions and I’ll personally choose the PHPBayPro Wordpress plugin which costs only $49 and is recommended from different people that successfully use it. Basically the plugin version let’s you create a complete eBay affiliate site right within Wordpress, easy and fast.

But the software alone isn’t all, what’s way more important is to find a niche where you actually can create sales. I already have some ideas and also managed to create a keyword list for it, meaning I’ve found some nice long tail keywords that’ll bring in traffic with less competition from other sites in the same niche. I picked a hot niche will searching on eBay’s Pulse, a page showing what’s currently hot on eBay. After that I’ve done my keyword research with help of only freely available tools like the Adwords keyword tool (which now shows search count in numbers) and Gtrends for example.

All I need to do now is registering the right domain name, writing some content and integrating PHPBayPro into a new Wordpress install. That shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish. Generating traffic to this site will be far more difficult in my opinion and I doubt I’ll see any early results from that site, although I hope to make some good bucks later on. Let’s see how it will perform, right now I only have my keyword list but I think I’ll start the new site this autumn.

I’m sure that I won’t earn enough to quit my day job from only one eBay site, but there’s nothing holding me back from creating more and more of them once they become profitable for me. Sure, right now everything is just plain theory, but I’ll do my best to accomplish this new goal.

Best Regards,
Querblogger

Today I will give you a real life example on how I made my first affiliate sale from a niche site. Before you read on, please don’t expect some secrets in this post on how to become rich overnight! If you really want to earn money online, you have to work hard for it!. Ok, now I will tell you everything I have personally done to make my first sale online, but please notice that I’m still a noob marketer! Warning! Long post ahead!

Although there are different techniques around, affiliate marketing basically consists of the following steps:

• Choosing a product you want to promote
• Finding and joining an affiliate program for that product
• Taking some time for keyword research on phrases people likely would type into search engines
• Creating a website, blog or landing page around your main keywords, filling it with usefull content while adding your affiliate links
• Driving traffic to your sites, the more the better
• Keeping your sites updated and optimizing them for better search engine rankings
• (Optional) Choosing the next product and repeating the whole process

Sounds easy and understandable? Well, it is easy, but that doesn’t mean there’s no work involved. Trust me, it’s hard work to reach a point where you earn a good amount of money (and I’m still working on it), but in the end it pays off for sure.

Ok, let’s go! See what I’ve done to make my first bucks from affiliate marketing…

Finding a product and affiliate program

The first thing I have done, was searching for the right product to promote. I must admit, this was the easiest step involved in starting my affiliate “career”. As I’m already a member of Clickbank, I thought: “Why not choosing a software title to promote?”. After doing some research on the CB marketplace, I finally found the right product for my upcoming niche site. I won’t reveal too much details here, all I can say is, that it was some kind of system optimizer for the Windows operating system.

I had choosen this product not only because I personally like optimizing my PC everday (I’m not a geek), but also because the product has shown some high gravity on Clickbank. Gravity? Yes, gravity! It’s only another word for the popularity of a product, so to say if it’s hot or not. Another reason for choosing it, was a high commission rate of 65% from the selling price, not bad compared to other affiliate programs.

So, first two steps done. Choosen a product, choosen an affiliate program. Perfect! Now, for some harder work…

Keyword Research – The free way

Before even starting to develop my niche site, I first had to do some good keyword research on the product I’ve choosen short before. I was mainly interested in the number of competing pages and the actual daily search volume for a particular keyword.

So I went to the free Wordtracker Gtrends Tool (unfortunately down at the moment) to enter some keywords that just came into my mind after thinking about the product’s features and benefits. It turned out that the actual name of the product (sorry I really can’t reveal it here) had the most searches and a relatively small amount of competing pages. I started the Gtrends tool for that keyword and found some other long-tail keywords and phrases that had nearly no competition, but at least some searches each day. Perfect keywords for a niche sites, chances were great to get some visitors to my site!

So, I now had the right words and phrases for my affiliate site. I’ve checked how many searches occured each day, and also found the possible number of visitors to a site that is ranked #1 in Google for a given keyword.

All in all, my niche site should get some visitors, even without optimizing it too much…

Creating my Website

After I had found the right keywords and key phrases for my future niche site about a system optimizer software, all I had to do was building the actual site.

The first thing I’ve done was searching for the right domain name for my site. Luckily, I found ine where I could directly put my main keyword in. I simply took the product name (again, I won’t reveal it here), added the words “review” and registered it on Namecheap, a very reliable domain registrar. Please note that I’ve asked for permission to use brand names in my domain, that’s really important in order to stay safe from legal issues!

The hosting for my site wasn’t that problem, because I already had an account on Hostgator, where I was able to host unlimited sites for cheap. So far, they are very reliable and I haven’t faced any downtimes or problems yet. I can only recommend them, especially if you want to start many small websites to make money from!

Ok, domain name bought, hosting ready. Now I had to build my niche site.

I thought about the best way to create my website and although I’m able to program a website by myself with help of HTML and CSS, I’ve choosen a far easier option, Wordpress.

Yes, Wordpress isn’t only a blogging software anymore. You can use it as a full-blown content management system (CMS) if you will. There are dozens of great plugins and themes available online and the best thing is, a Wordpress based site is easy to manage, even for a newbie!

So, I had set up a Wordpress install for my product review site, had choosen a nice template (which shouldn’t be too fancy and graphics loaded) and installed some useful plugins like the All in One Seo Pack or a Sitemap Generator for some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The site was now ready to be filled with content, the main ingredient for getting quaility traffic and sales…

Content for my Niche Site

The next step involved in setting up my first niche site, was writing the actual content. After setting up the Wordpress install, which I use as some kind of a content management system, writing the content was nothing more than writing skills (also I’m far from being a perfect good average writer) and including the right keywords.

My main focus was writing search engine friendly content that also appeals for readers who like to get a honest review on the product I promote on my site.

So, I’ve written only two blog posts that describe features and benefits of the system optimizer software, the product I choosed to promote and make money from (what else, hehe…)

Each post had a lenght of around 500 to 600 words and contained my main keywords, distributed throughout the whole text. That’s really important for your search engine rankings. Google, to name the big boss on the search engine market, gives more weight to sites that closely rely on given keywords. So, stay focused, but don’t look too spammy with too many keyword phrases.

After the posts were written, I added my Clickbank affiliate link, a banner in the left side menu of my site, and an advertising blog from Speedyads to monetize every kind of traffic that will come to my site.

I also cloaked my affiliate links with a simple PHP redirect. So, instead of having ugly and long affiliate links, I managed to get much nicer ones like domain.com/download.php for example.

So far I was lucky with my efforts, but something was still missing. Yeah!, traffic…

Getting Traffic to my Site

Now you probably think the hardest part of the work was finally over?! Well, I would say the work now really just began.

Driving traffic to a site is a very critical part in making affiliate sales. What would a well-written and keyword rich site be without any traffic? Nothing special in my opinion (and something you won’t ever make money from).

On my first affiliate marketing journey, to give it an other name, I mainly focused on getting organic traffic, meaning visitors from search engines like Google for example. In other words, everything but paid traffic. In order to get organic traffic, a website must at first be listed in search engines, which shouldn’t be a problem. But it must also be listed as high as possible in the search engine results pages (SERPs) , the higher the better.

There are different things you can do to improve your rankings. Besides wrtiting quality content, which I’ve already done, you have to gain backlinks to your site. Each link back to your site counts as a vote to your site.l The more votes you can get, the higher your rankings get and therfore the more traffic will reach your website.

Because the best backlinks come from high PageRank sites, my goal was to focus on gaining exactly those links.

The first thing I’ve done was submitting my site to some hundred online directories. I used a software called Directory Submitter to automate a huge part of this hard (and boring) work. I can only recommend this tool, the free edition includes some hundred directories to start with, worth a try!

The next, and probably best step was submitting articles to high PageRank article directories like Ezinearticles for example. This strategy, also known as article or bum marketing, helps alot in increasing your search engine rankings. I’ve therefore written some articles that deal about the system optimizer software I promote, most times background information and benefits from using that software.

Most article directories give you the option to include a closing paragraph, where you can set a link to the site you’re promoting. This way, after publishing the articles, you’ll get free high PageRank backlinks to your niche site. I submitted three articles to three different article directories. I haven’t submitted them all at once, but one after another over the course of one or two weeks.

The last step worth to mention, was writing a Squidoo lens about the software. Especially Google really loves Squidoo lenses, most time they rank very well in the search results. Of course I’ve also included links back to my site! Squidoo even allows affiliate links within your len’s content, a great promotion tool.

There are many more ways to drive traffic to your sites, including paid campaigns for example, but I won’t go any deeper here. Feel free to google your way to more information, I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for!

All in all, after some days my site received its first traffic from Google. I checked my current rankings and found my site at position 14 from over 300,000 directly competing pages. You see the power of article marketing?

Althoug my site rank wasn’t the best, I still received 5 to 10 unique visitors a day. It’s not much, I know, but mainly because I focused on a reall tiny niche. Anyway, the traffic was enough to bring me my first sale after only one month after starting this site. I was really surprised to see $30 in my Clickbank account!

Conclusion

Now you know how much work is involved in setting up even a small niche site. From searching a product and affiliate program, over keyword research and writing content, to driving traffic to your niche site, it’s a long way to make your first sale.

But it’s also really worth it. With some routine and a good amount of passion, everyone should be able to set up a niche site within only a week or so. If a site works out and makes at least some money, start the next one and repeat the process. It’s up to you. But don’t completely forget about your already started sites, optimization should be an ongoing task for you, although you won’t have to spend your whole time for it.

I hope you found my post at least a bit helpful. All things I’ve achieved the last month are nothing compared to what a “real” affiliate marketer deals with everyday. I knwo about this, but I’m proud enough to tell you my noob story here, it’s another goal I’ve reached. I now know that affiliate marketing really works and I would be dumb if I wouldn’t put any more efforts in it. Other projects are already in planning phase, so stay tuned!

See you soon,
Querblogger

PS: I’ll soon write about a new project from my friend Tiberius Burciu, owner of My PPC Advertising. Well…you’ll see!

I’ve promised it already in some of my last posts and now it is time to disclose our secret. Me and my friend Midwest from MyPPCAdvertising have worked on our first web project for the last weeks, hence the lack of updates But now it is time to open it to the public!

If you look at the title of this post you may already guess what this project is all about. And yes you’re right, it’s an URL shortening service named Shrtnd.com! We both are proud to release this service to all of our readers (and the rest of the world) free of charge.

The last days we had many things to do. Starting with an idea from Midwest, we gathered some good scripts, built a website and custom design, included some kind of content, worked on some monetization strategies, bought a domain and hosting package and finally checked the whole site for potential errors. You see, a lot of work was involved, but now we are ready to finally launch shrtnd.com.

So what can you expect from our URL shortener? Well, a simple and easy interface to make any long URL short. You are able to enter any URL you like, add some custom tags if you will and finally let our service “shortify” that URL. It takes only a second or two, and your URL will be a shortened one. You can then use it wherever you like, within your own website or blog, in your next email or SMS message. I could tell you more about shortening an URL, but to save some time, feel free to have a look at our info page about the advantages from URL shortening.

Some last info. You may ask what an URL shortening site has to do with making money online? It’s simple, we both hope to make some money from it. Therefore we have integrated some advertising banners at the bottom of the page which contain affiliate links that’ll get us commissions. All we need to make (some) money from this site is traffic, the more the better

We will do our best to promote the site with different free and paid advertising services and we’ll keep you informed about our progress and the potential earnings.

For now, please visit shrtnd.com to test it by yourself. If you like the service, feel free to set a link to it and spread the word. We appreciate any help from you, our fellow readers! If you like to write a review on your own blog, do it! Me and Midwest have started a nice contest! If you are under the first 10 bloggers who write about shrtnd.com, you´ll get 200 Entrecard credits from us. What you have to do, is simply writing a review on our site, then leave a comment on one of our blogs containing the URL to your review post and the email address we should send the credits to. After we have approved your review, we will immediately credit your Entrecard account with 200 points. But remeber, you have to be one of the first 10 people who write such an review in order to get them!

With my best regards and happy reviewing,
Querblogger