First affiliate commission! Next Steps?
Hey everyone,
FIrst off thanks to everyone for the wealth of great information available here - without this community I would not have been able to accomplish my first affiliate commission/sale!
So, I ended last week on a positive note after going through a rough week having lost my 92 year old grandfather. I logged into my LinkShare account on Friday and found out that I had a $600 sale, which resulted in a $30 commission for me! Since last weekend, I had another purchase which only gave me a few extra dollars, however I am now very energized to keep moving forward in affiliate marketing and niche marketing...
Let's rewind a few months so I can give you a little background. Since I was in high school, I have been managing a website for a local candy company and have been trying to get them to sell their products online for 7 years - to date they online wanted an online presence, but not a store. This company has a very loyal local following and have a registered trademark chocolate product that people love. Not only is this product great, but so is all of their other chocolates and candies.
So, this past Thanksgiving, the owners called me and stated they were ready to take the business online and wanted to start an online store for them. In three weeks, I setup their entire online business, everything from integrating the shipping and shopping carts, writing the product descriptions, Facebook, twitter, making the graphics and taking/editing the pictures of their products, etc.... It was a LOT of work, but I had a bunch of down time at my full time job so that filled the void for me and kept me busy!
Fast forward through the holiday season - we sold about $2300 worth of products between Dec 1st and the end of January - pretty good to start! For all of my effort, I worked out an agreement with the owners so that I would be compensated at 15% of all online sales because they did not want to invest thousands of dollars for web design and such. I saw the potential for the online business and agreed to take the role of web designer/developer and marketer for the 15% cut in sales I would get. Needless to say, I have since invested countless hours of time and effort in getting everything up and running, training staff, and more recently expanding the business through internet marketing. What is great is that I had NO initial investment at all other than my time. Since I started, I have made nearly $750 so far, which I began to invest in my own business and ventures now that everything is up and running with the candy store. They also paid for two software packages for internet marketing: market samurai and the best spinner.
My interest in internet marketing didn't start until January after I came across a site for internet marketing that had tutorials and information all about niche marketing. I began writing articles for the candy companies website, submitting to article directories, obtaining backlinks etc... Most of these were to maximize keyword traffic for the easter holiday so I tailored the articles to keywords that we thought would be applicable to our business (after using market samurai to help of course!). I spun a few articles and submitted them to article directories - wow, this takes a LOT of time!
Since January, we now rank on the first page in google for several of our keywords (and easter keywords) and are seeing traffic above 30 unique users per day! This week, we have been over 50 unique visits everyday, and expect this to increase as we get closer to Easter. Most of this was accomplished using free techniques and article directories. Social bookmarking and back linking were also used. Last week we had a storewide sale, which resulted in approx $1000 worth of product sales for candy. Hopefully as we continue up until Easter, our SERP rankings will continue to rise and we will have more and more sales.
Aside from this, I have also developed a mailing list on the site and have placed some affiliate marketing products on the website and in some of our emails. I have sent out several emails and promotions as well as updated our Facebook and twitter accounts with some affiliate offers, but not too many. Finally, last week I had an affiliate commission sale, to which I receive all of the commissions! This resulted in $30 extra for me last week in addition to the 15% in candy product sales!
I also began a niche site which has adsense on it as well as an affiliate products but is not really receiving much traffic yet - though it has some great content that is very targeted to a very specific audience. I have a ton of information and articles ready to go, but have yet to pull the trigger on my strategy to begin promoting it (partly because it is not 100% complete yet). I have about 5-6 more pages to develop for the site at which point I feel it would be ready to go. Hopefully I will finish these things by the end of next week.
Looking forward, I wanted to continue to develop this candy website for other holidays/events/projects in addition to dabbling in other market niches (such as the one I am currently developing). My question to all of you is, now that I have a ton of content developed how do I go about increasing my rankings on this candy website, and on my other niche site to which I have yet to start promoting?
I have heard some good things about Blog Blueprint and Unique Article Wizard, though have yet to use either of these products. I have purchased the best spinner software and have about 20 articles to be spun and promoted between the candy website and my other niche site. Anyone have experience with these tools or any others they can recommend?
My plan is to build backlinks through free methods (such as social bookmarking and paulie ciera's backlinks) as well as through article marketing. With article marketing though, I want to be sure I get the most bang for my buck per se, which is why I was looking into Blog Blueprint and UAW. What else can I do to help increase my search rankings in addition to monitoring my sites and email lists and should I or should I not use these tools?
I'm excited to begin moving forward with more things, however, I am finding that this is quite time consuming but well worth the effort! Eventually, I would like to be earning enough money to be able to outsource some of the repetitive chores of backlinking, article spinning, and submitting to article directories, but want to keep this as low cost as possible. Being that I am earning some money right now, I would be willing to pay for some of these tools (UAW and blog blueprint) but want to make sure I choose the right one... If anyone has thoughts and recommendations I would appreciate it!
I am very open and willing to learn and appreciate all your help and support. I thank everyone for their invaluable contributions to this great community and hope that you veterans can help noobs like me persist and keep moving forward!
Thanks,
Daryn
FIrst off thanks to everyone for the wealth of great information available here - without this community I would not have been able to accomplish my first affiliate commission/sale!
So, I ended last week on a positive note after going through a rough week having lost my 92 year old grandfather. I logged into my LinkShare account on Friday and found out that I had a $600 sale, which resulted in a $30 commission for me! Since last weekend, I had another purchase which only gave me a few extra dollars, however I am now very energized to keep moving forward in affiliate marketing and niche marketing...
Let's rewind a few months so I can give you a little background. Since I was in high school, I have been managing a website for a local candy company and have been trying to get them to sell their products online for 7 years - to date they online wanted an online presence, but not a store. This company has a very loyal local following and have a registered trademark chocolate product that people love. Not only is this product great, but so is all of their other chocolates and candies.
So, this past Thanksgiving, the owners called me and stated they were ready to take the business online and wanted to start an online store for them. In three weeks, I setup their entire online business, everything from integrating the shipping and shopping carts, writing the product descriptions, Facebook, twitter, making the graphics and taking/editing the pictures of their products, etc.... It was a LOT of work, but I had a bunch of down time at my full time job so that filled the void for me and kept me busy!
Fast forward through the holiday season - we sold about $2300 worth of products between Dec 1st and the end of January - pretty good to start! For all of my effort, I worked out an agreement with the owners so that I would be compensated at 15% of all online sales because they did not want to invest thousands of dollars for web design and such. I saw the potential for the online business and agreed to take the role of web designer/developer and marketer for the 15% cut in sales I would get. Needless to say, I have since invested countless hours of time and effort in getting everything up and running, training staff, and more recently expanding the business through internet marketing. What is great is that I had NO initial investment at all other than my time. Since I started, I have made nearly $750 so far, which I began to invest in my own business and ventures now that everything is up and running with the candy store. They also paid for two software packages for internet marketing: market samurai and the best spinner.
My interest in internet marketing didn't start until January after I came across a site for internet marketing that had tutorials and information all about niche marketing. I began writing articles for the candy companies website, submitting to article directories, obtaining backlinks etc... Most of these were to maximize keyword traffic for the easter holiday so I tailored the articles to keywords that we thought would be applicable to our business (after using market samurai to help of course!). I spun a few articles and submitted them to article directories - wow, this takes a LOT of time!
Since January, we now rank on the first page in google for several of our keywords (and easter keywords) and are seeing traffic above 30 unique users per day! This week, we have been over 50 unique visits everyday, and expect this to increase as we get closer to Easter. Most of this was accomplished using free techniques and article directories. Social bookmarking and back linking were also used. Last week we had a storewide sale, which resulted in approx $1000 worth of product sales for candy. Hopefully as we continue up until Easter, our SERP rankings will continue to rise and we will have more and more sales.
Aside from this, I have also developed a mailing list on the site and have placed some affiliate marketing products on the website and in some of our emails. I have sent out several emails and promotions as well as updated our Facebook and twitter accounts with some affiliate offers, but not too many. Finally, last week I had an affiliate commission sale, to which I receive all of the commissions! This resulted in $30 extra for me last week in addition to the 15% in candy product sales!
I also began a niche site which has adsense on it as well as an affiliate products but is not really receiving much traffic yet - though it has some great content that is very targeted to a very specific audience. I have a ton of information and articles ready to go, but have yet to pull the trigger on my strategy to begin promoting it (partly because it is not 100% complete yet). I have about 5-6 more pages to develop for the site at which point I feel it would be ready to go. Hopefully I will finish these things by the end of next week.
Looking forward, I wanted to continue to develop this candy website for other holidays/events/projects in addition to dabbling in other market niches (such as the one I am currently developing). My question to all of you is, now that I have a ton of content developed how do I go about increasing my rankings on this candy website, and on my other niche site to which I have yet to start promoting?
I have heard some good things about Blog Blueprint and Unique Article Wizard, though have yet to use either of these products. I have purchased the best spinner software and have about 20 articles to be spun and promoted between the candy website and my other niche site. Anyone have experience with these tools or any others they can recommend?
My plan is to build backlinks through free methods (such as social bookmarking and paulie ciera's backlinks) as well as through article marketing. With article marketing though, I want to be sure I get the most bang for my buck per se, which is why I was looking into Blog Blueprint and UAW. What else can I do to help increase my search rankings in addition to monitoring my sites and email lists and should I or should I not use these tools?
I'm excited to begin moving forward with more things, however, I am finding that this is quite time consuming but well worth the effort! Eventually, I would like to be earning enough money to be able to outsource some of the repetitive chores of backlinking, article spinning, and submitting to article directories, but want to keep this as low cost as possible. Being that I am earning some money right now, I would be willing to pay for some of these tools (UAW and blog blueprint) but want to make sure I choose the right one... If anyone has thoughts and recommendations I would appreciate it!
I am very open and willing to learn and appreciate all your help and support. I thank everyone for their invaluable contributions to this great community and hope that you veterans can help noobs like me persist and keep moving forward!
Thanks,
Daryn
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shuvo -
Thanks
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