Not sure where to go from here

If I were you, I'll keep doing affiliate marketing in a bigger scale with the money I have. I'll hire my family members, buy some laptops, and teach them how to do it with me (I won't need to reveal all my secrets). They'll be my other hands. And I'll just need to split some profit with them as payment. IMHO.

If you can put together some info that you know will benefit your readers, then you absolutely can run a blog successfully.

Don't worry about who's an authority or who isn't one. Fact is, there's always gonna be someone who knows more about your subject than you do. But that doesn't mean you can't still contribute something meaningful and useful to your audience.

Here are some sites you might find useful:

smartblogger.com
robbierichards.com

Hey there is a lot more to it than just sticking up a niche affiliate site!


You need to:

• wait months for google to stop the google dance and place the posts properly
• Build links to that site in order to rank which takes months
• watch out for the scam affiliate sites that trick the seo system with blackhat!

Hi Karmadog,

I'll support the suggestion for you to keep on doing what you are now doing, because that is what is giving you 'cash flow'.

What you are really considering is either expanding or upgrading your current business or finding another income stream.

You seem to have article writing skills and had made some money posting ads on your blog. Blogging and article writing skills is a perfect marriage.

So you can consider blogging with links or banners to current cash flow products and check out if the articles or posts on your blog can start another income stream for you.

LB.

There are a lot of really good FREE Wordpress Themes. Some of them area easy to customize to some extent, and there are outsource workers who will make other changes for a few dollars.

Owning your own site should get you better results from the exact same systems used on free-content locations, and you typically have a lot more control.

I'd recommend setting up your own site (WordPress is easy to install and use), with the best free Theme you can find, then once you're making good profits, you can re-invest in a better Theme, and at that point, I'd recommend the advice on Yoast, which is that although most free themes claim to be "SEO optimized" this is usually far from the truth for almost all of them, and using one that genuinely IS optimized for SEO should improve results further.

That's one of the great things about online-business . . . it is often possible to start and test for little money, and only spend a bit more once you're already making a profit.

Hope that helps

Chris

Work and grow with what is working for you. If you are making money then fantastic. The next question is how can I double that? That is where tracking is so important so now you have something to measure agaist and scale...

Tough to say considering we don't how well you've done other than that you've made "some money". Nor do we know how scaleable what you're doing is.

I can tell you that when I first started online about 8 or 9 years ago, I blogged for about 3 days and absolutely hated it. Granted I didn't know anything, but it sucked not seeing any results and not really knowing if what I was doing would bring results at some point.

Fast forward to today, and I began blogging roughly six months ago. I've posted about 145 blog posts and we currently rank for around 1,300-1,400 keywords. It's a lot easier to stay motivated when you're seeing results.

Personally, I think you need to strategize more. I know that you said you have other methods for driving traffic, but I can't think of any logical explaination for why a business shouldn't include blogging and providing fresh content to their audience. I mean, why would anyone pass up on free traffic and potential leads. The problem I see, and I'm not an affiliate marketer, is aligning your blog with products from different creators and funneling your traffic. This is assuming that you're going to enter the "weight loss" market and not a niched down segment of the market as most people here will tell you to do.

The best thing I ever did was buy long tail pro and put together a list of 100s of keywords I want to target. Generally, I target keywords with a competition under 40 unless there's a topic I really want to talk about. As out DA grows, we'll target some higher competition keywords.

Do use a blog.

Build a list in your niche and utilize your blog as a tool to provide value to that niche. I would not worry to much about how much traffic you are getting to your blog at first.

Focus on list building at first and use your blog posts to send broadcast messages.

First step to a solid and reliable business - always - LIST BUILDING... that is where the money is and that is what is gonna give your business stability

To your success,
JC