How a Newbie Makes Monthly Income
I've been a long time lurker and have only been doing IM for just about a year on the side. But since this forum has been so helpful to me, I wanted to give back in some way and share how I make a couple hundred a month through one niche site that I own. A lot of this isn't original, and I'm sure that there are a lot of other more experienced IMers that could make this process easier and faster. I apologize in advance if I am all over the place...
I'll go into more detail if requested...
Anyway, quick background... I currently work full-time for a very large aerospace company. Well, although I get paid decently, the job isn't that challenging, plus my wife wanted to be able to stay at home with the kids, so I needed to find a way to make extra income. Asking for a promotion didn't work out too well, plus, I would have needed about a 50% increase anyway.
I decided to start my own business fixing home computers in hopes that it would lead to bigger things. The pay sucked, the hours were long, and I realized that I hated it.
In 6 months, I made a whopping $340...
BUT, the fact was that I was getting paid for something that I was doing on my own.
I had been dabbling with web development, with outsourcing, and then with niche marketing for a while and decided to create a web development business that leveraged outsourced employees (this will be for another thread if anyone would like to know). At the same time, I hired one person to focus solely on my niche marketing endeavors.
First Mistakes
Although I thought knew how to do keyword research, and I taught my VA how to do it too, I didn't know how to correctly choose a niche. I had been recently listening to another well-known IMer that was big on targeting health and fitness products that you can promote via Amazon.
Since it was a big ticket item and because there were some keywords that I "thought" would work - I chose Home Gyms.
These were the keywords that were potentially targeted:
I had my VA create a site, optimized it and started backlinking. The site was homegymwonders (dot) com. (Now a parked domain)
I decided to rank for home fitness gym.
One of the most important things that I found out was that Google's keyword tool doesn't tell you how people type in keywords. For example "Home Fitness Gym" may have a ton of searches according to Google, but that doesn't mean it's types in that exact way. People may search for "Home Gym Fitness" or "Gym Home Fitness". While this may not seem like a big deal, it is.
To me, the main reason why having your words in the right order is important is because you get a true sense of the competition. Check out these two competetion analyses (keep in mind these were done with Market Samrai that was over a year old. They recently changed their calculations):
The first is for the keyword "Home Fitness Gym", competition isn't too bad right (as far as PR is concerned)...
Now check out "Home Gym Fitness", which is a far more correctly searched term.
If you were going after "Home Fitness Gym", not only would you be targeting an irrelevant and un-searched keyword - you'd be facing more competition than you were expecting.
After 3 months of backlinking... Nothing. I wasn't in a ranking that would justify continuing.
As many of the awesome gurus here will tell you, the last thing that you want to do is dwell on something that doesn't work. That being said, it was time to start over...
Lessons learned
- The main problem was that I was choosing "niche" that was far more competitive than my beginner keyword research had shown.
- The keywords that I had used, although they looked like they got good traffic, they were often permutations and weren't truly searched in the exact way as I was marketing them.
- I should have choen a domain name that had better keyword relevance (although I have ranked terms high without it with other sites).
- The order of keywords matter.
Disclaimer: I AM A NOOB. These are just my experiences in what works and what doesn't. I am sure there are gurus out there that have a different take on this or I may be completely wrong.
I will move into what worked for me and how I made a site that makes decent monthly income in the next post if people are interested.
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Limited Time Webinar: The Easy way to Start Selling THOUSANDS a month using Wholesale on Amazon with only a few hours a week. Ends soon!
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