Long time ago since I’ve last written a post here on TMME. I must excuse for being late with my writings, but I’m still quite busy at the moment with my new projects. Anyway, let me give you a short update on my current progress.

You may now that I’m currently working on 3 new niche websites where I promote several products from the Clickbank affiliate network. Each product will bring me around $30 to $40 in commissions if someone is buying through one of my sites. I’ve personally proved that such websites are really working, my first niche site I created several months ago still brings me around $30 to $60 per months, without further working on it.

Right now I’m done with creating the niche sites and I’m in the progress of driving traffic to these sites. I’m using article marketing for the main portion of traffic. I’ve already written several articles and submitted them to Ezinearticles. I must say, it really works! Although I haven’t made any sales with these sites right now, I’m already receiving traffic, around 30 to 40 unique visitors per day for all 3 of my sites (yes I know, it isn’t really that much…). The best thing is, that I already got some clicks on my Clickbank affiliate links too!

I must definitely write many more articles in order to create sales from my sites. The more traffic I can drive to my niche sites via my articles, the more possible sales I’ll hopefully have! Maybe I will also hire a copywriter who will write those articles for me. I’ve seen people on the Warriorforum who are writing quality articles for $5 per 300 words. And since I’m making quite good money from NeoBux, I’m sure I can afford some bucks to help me getting my job done.

Ok, enough for now. I’ll keep you updated!

Bye,
Querblogger

This post is about the benefits of using Squidoo as a great tool to make money, drive traffic and to show other people that you’re an expert in a certain niche. Because I’ve already written some of those so called lenses by myself, I want to share my thoughts about it.

Squidoo is a web project launched and founded by Seth Godin in October 2005. Basically it offers you to write and publish single webpages, so called lenses, that may deal about different things you like and/or want to promote. You can think about Squidoo like a bloghost, with the exception that your blog will be more like a static webpage that you only update from time to time.

Creating a Squidoo lens is relatively easy. After choosing the right name for your lens (it will be part of your URL, e.g. Squidoo.com/YourLensName) you can immediately start filling it with content. A lens consists of different modules like a text module or a questbook for example. You can add as many different modules as you want, there’s no limit in possibilities. Each module should be filled with content, e.g. in a text module you should write down the text that belongs to your lens’ theme. After adding all necessary modules, text, images and other stuff you like, you have to publish your lens and it will immediately go live and starts receiving traffic.

The best thing about a Squidoo lens is the fact that you’re allowed to place links (including affiliate links) right within your lens’ content. You can add as many as you want and use them to either drive traffic to your websites/blogs or to directly generate affiliate sales for example. Because Squidoo is very popular, frequently visited from many people around the world and new lenses are indexed extremely fast, it’s a perfect marketing tool! When choosing the right keywords to target and with good content, it’s quite possible to make some nice affiliate sales and money.

Squidoo also features a revenue sharing model, meaning that each lens you’ve published may bring you also a share of all the advertising revenues it has generated. Those revenue comes from ads shown next to your lens and also from Amazon widgets if you want to use them in your lens. If you have a popular lens with lots of traffic, then you may see some bucks from that revenue sharing alone. You can also donate your earnings to different charities if you will.

So far I’ve only written and published 4 lenses, but I’m amazed about how well they perform and help me in making some extra money. Especially my lens about NeoBux brings several new referrals each day and it is listed in the top 10 for the same keyword. Squidoo lenses are definitely worth your time if you want to get some extra traffic or money. You can use them to create a small piece of online real estate that you can use to establish your online business, be it lenses about products you promote or useful articles that will show others that you’re an expert in your field. Squidoo is a nice and free way to increase your online exposure to potential buyers, readers, whatever you like. Simply give it a try and start creating your first lens right now, it’s easy!

Bye bye,
Querblogger

The last days I thought about what would be better and easier to market, a niche product with small competition and less traffic or a popular item with lots of competitors and a whole bunch of traffic?

Well I haven’t got the excact answer for that yet, but so far I’ve already found some advantages and also disadvantages from both affiliate marketing methods. First, and before I’ve read some very interesting threads on the Warriorforum and other sites, I thought that going niche would be the ideal way for promoting products as an affiliate and making some good money from it. Indeed, niche marketing really works. I’ve already made some sales from my personal Clickbank niche test site that I created some months ago. But is it the “holy grail” of affiliate marketing?

A good question if you ask me. Although niche marketing has many benefits like having fewer competitors and an easy search engine domination with your choosen keywords, there are still some major disadvantages. The worst of all is traffic, simply as that. A niche market is, you may quess it, tailormade to a small group of people that are interested in a particular topic. Therefore potential traffic to a niche site is usually small too. Less traffic means few sales means less money. But doesn’t one want to make more money from affiliate marketing? What about choosing a more competitive “niche” with more traffic, more sales, more money to make?

You know what I want to say? No? Ok, let me explain. What would be better, to get a big piece of a small cake or to get a small piece of a (really) big cake? I would rather choose the smaller piece, not because I’m not that hungry…

Establishing you affiliate business, the small piece of cake, in a highly competitive market, the really huge cake itself, has some benfits too. Although you have a lot of competitors you also have the chance to grasp a certain percentage of the high traffic that swirls around a popular product. You don’t necessarily have to get to the first search engine results for your particular keyword in order to get some of that traffic. Even if your affiliate site is ranked at the 5th or even 10th position, it will probably bring you enough traffic, depending on how hot the product/service is that you’r about to promote. Maybe even more traffci than from a tiny niche site.

So what’s the difference between creating a niche site that you have to get ranked on the topmost search results in order to get some traffic and creating a site in a competitive market with a ranking far behind the first sites but with a lot of traffic? I personally think, and that’s also the reason of this post and my thoughts, it’s the work involved in creating an affiliate site and driving traffic to it. What would be easier, to maintain a number one position in the SERPs or say position number 50? Sure, the second position.

To sum up my thoughts, I think going for a popular product or service should be easier to make money with than creating a niche site. First, a popular item means traffic, a lot of traffic. Second, you wouldn’t have to maintain a #1 position in the search results, hence less SEO work. Third, you have a lot of competitors that have choosen many longtail keywords that you can “spy out” (hehe, evil evil) and choose for your own site (which should be a bit better optimized than your competitor’s one).

Now my question, what do YOU think about it? Is niche marketing the fantastic affiliate marketing money maker or is it going after a popular product and so to say being a “parasite” that subsists from the huge traffic such a product has created?

As I already said at the beginning, I don’t have a correct answer yet, althoug I’ve read some other people’s thought about going broad is far better than niche marketing. Just want to know what you think about it.

So long,
Querblogger

It seems all the efforts in building my first affiliate niche site have really paid off so far. Today I made my third affiliate sale and another $37 arrived in my Clickbank account.

Although this may sound a bit like bigheadedness, I won’t boast about how a good affiliate marketer I am. On the contrary, I’m such a noob in the affiliate business and it’s maybe only luck that I make my first money from this site. I only want to show you that it IS possible to make money from it!

Now I’m at a point where I seriously think about starting some other niche sites in order to make some good money. Sure, not enough for quitting my dayjob right now, but enough to have some extra cash in the pocket. Well, I’ll work on it.

See you later,
Querblogger

PS: I’ll soon write the next update about my progress with “My Homepages Friends”, the site where you get paid to search the internet!

Around 2 week ago I wrote about how I made my first sale from affiliate marketing. I told you that there’s some good work involved in setting up an affiliate site, e.g. filling it with content or promoting it in order to get more traffic. I also told you, that such sites most times pay off for themselves in the end. Well…my little niche site has brought me yet another $30 in my Clickbank account!

As I first started to explore the world of affiliate marketing, especially niche marketing, I thought it would be way too difficult to actually make money from it. Now I see that it IS possible to make money from it, which doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult at all. All you need is passion about your “job”, work toward your own goals and you’ll reach them! Mhmm, I already sound like a super affiliate…

Should be all for now,

Cheers,
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!