How I made my first sale in exactly 30 days (and how I've made 130 since)

The following is a blog post I wrote recently and it got a lot of positive feedback from the newbie's that read it. Because of this, I've decided to share it here on the forum for those newbies that didn't get a chance to read it when I originally posted it.

Back on November 19th, I wrote about how one of my niche sites made it onto the first page of Google in just 8 days. I'm very pleased to announce that this same niche site made its very first sale exactly 30 days after it was launched. Really...it was exactly 30 days, I'm not making this stuff up!



Today, I'm going to tell you the exact actions that I took to promote the site, share some analytics, and what my plans are for its future.

And then at the end, I'll discuss my "site a week" strategy and how the math is supposed to play out. You'll really like this part!

My 30 Day Action Plan

I'm a big fan of checklists. When I was 19, I got my pilots license, and guess what? I was taught that pilots use checklists. The great thing about using a checklist is that its really hard to miss a step when you build a new site. It also makes it much easier to outsource portions (or all) of the launch to your VA/team.

On my checklist, I have a sections titled:

• mandatory initial setup
• mandatory launch content & promotion
• optional initial setup
• content building and backlinking (VA)
• By breaking down my site launch into manageable steps, it makes my life a whole lot easier - especially given the fact that I launch 3-4 sites every month (I'll get into how I find all these niches in a later post, so subscribe to my feed if you want the info).

If I was to summarize the site launch and promotion strategies, it would look like this:

• find a profitable niche (I use Market Samurai)
• register the domain (I use NameCheap)
• Set up the hosting (I used Hostgator for this site)
• deploy site with all my usual plugins (I use WPDirect and can launch a site in 20 minutes or less)
• add base level of content that matches with my 5 keywords
• add 30-50 product posts (this is an Amazon affiliate site so I used the WPZonBuilder plugin to create my 50 gorgeous SEO-friendly product posts with just a few mouse clicks - HUGE time saver!!)
• order articles to be written for 5 keywords (I found my writer on Fiverr.com)
• spin the articles that she writes for me (I use The Best Spinner)
• social bookmark all posts, category pages, and tag pages (my VA uses SocialAdr)
• manually publish those articles to top 5 directories (my VA does this)
• automatically publish those articles to approximately 1000 directories via Unique Article Wizard (my VA does this, too)
• optional step: automatically publish those articles to approximately 300 PR3 blogs via Blog Blueprint (my VA does this, too)

If you want a copy of my checklist, you can optin at my blog.

Finding a Profitable Niche

I have blogged previously about how I do this with both free tools (very time consuming) and via Market Samurai.

I'll add that I found this particular niche by first starting with something I was actively involved in (mountain biking) and then used Market Samurai to find a micro niche within the mountain biking market. I normally advocate researching the commercial viability of a niche before proceeding, but in this case, I skipped that step because I already had a very strong understanding of the mountain biking market and knew what types of products would sell.

How to Deploy a Site in 60 Minutes or Less

Truth be told, I can now launch a site in under 30 minutes. With a bit of practice, you will be able to do the same.

I should clarify that by "launch", I mean the following steps:

• register the domain
• setup the hosting
• install Wordpress
• install my chosen theme
• install all my plugins
• I realize that this may sound like a lot, but if you are using checklists and a VA you will be able to get this done really fast.

Why is fast so important? Well, if your goal is to launch a large number of niche sites, you need to be able to do this quickly. Unless you don't need sleep, that is!

Publish My Product Posts

This next part is where you can really save some time and end up with a very professional looking site - assuming your plan is to promote Amazon affiliate products. Just watch the video below, and you'll see how I use the WPZonBuilder plugin to handle this step.

(I couldn't post this video, so you'll have to go to my blog to watch it)

One of the things that I really like about being an Amazon affiliate (aside from how easy WPZonBuilder makes it to create product posts) is that Amazon will pay me for everything that visitor purchases for a 24 hour period after they initially log onto Amazon. This is evidenced when I look at my Amazon affiliate reports and I see that I'm receiving commissions on products that I don't even promote!

Social Bookmark All Posts, Categories, and Tags

Thanks to SocialAdr, bookmarking my content has never been easier. All I need to do is have a given page loaded, click a "bookmarklet" button on my browser and then fill out the form as is shown below. The SocialAdr software then provides me with thousands of submissions (as of this writing, I have over 48,000 bookmark submissions for approximately 82 pages of content that I have so far submitted)



Publishing Articles

While the above product posts are definitely SEO-optimized, they are not likely to be optimized for the exact 5 keywords that I selected when I did my research with Market Samurai. Because of this, I need to publish additional content. As I don't want to write this content, I use Fiverr.com to find writers who will write SEO friendly articles for five bucks a crack.

Aside from the obvious benefit of the time saved (especially if you aren't a good writer or don't enjoy it), the other major benefit of getting 5 articles is that I now have 5 pieces of unique content that I can spin and publish to the article directories to get all those valuable backlinks! I also have my VA manually submit spun versions of these article to the following article directories:

• EzineArticles
• Amazines
• GoArticles
• ArticleDashboard
• ArticleAlley

How to Spin an Article

If you aren't familiar with the term "spinning", all that it means is to replace words and phrases in an article with their synonyms so that you can easily create more unique versions of the same piece of content. Taking this step is absolutely critical when it comes to getting backlinks.

If you've done all your on-page SEO correctly, the only way you are going to be able to increase your rank on the SERPs (search engine results pages) is going to be by adding more backlinks to your site. I have already explained how I do this in an earlier post, so I won't get into too much detail here again.

In that post, I wrote that I was going to be doing a test between the Blog Blueprint and the Unique Article Wizard and I now have some results to share with you. But before I share the results, let me summarize what the experiment consisted of.

On one niche site, I used Blog Blueprint and made 3 blog posts on a daily basis. In each blog post, there were links back to my niche site with my keywords as the anchor text for the link (This is anchor text).

On the other niche site, I published 6 articles via Unique Article Wizard and each resource box contained two links with keyword specific anchor text that pointed back to my anchor text sites, which in turn had a single post with keyword specific anchor text that pointed back to my niche site. If this sounds confusing, just look at the diagram below.



I then set UAW to make 350 submissions per day per article. The reason for the anchor sites (squiddo, tumbler, blogspot, etc...) was so that they could receive 350 submissions per day without looking unusual. If you were to have the links point directly back to your niche site, you would want to limit UAW to just 50 submissions per day.

The web 2.0 sites that I used for my anchor sites are:

• blogger.com
• wordpress.com
• livejournal.com
• typepad.com
• tumblr.com
• squidoo.com
• hubpages.com

Backlinking Experiment - Results

Before I get into the results, I want to emphasize one thing - no count of back links is every 100% accurate, so take these results with a grain of salt.

Results achieved with Blog Blueprint



Results achieved with Unique Article Wizard



As you can see, Unique Article Wizard achieved a greater number of backlinks, but they are all PR0 backlinks. Blog Blueprint, on the other hand, achieved only about half the total number of backlinks, but four of those links were PR3 or greater.

According to everything that I've ever read, a PR1 back link is worth about 10x a PR0, and a PR2 is worth 10x a PR1, etc... so it would seem that Blog Blueprint achieved more value, at least in terms of the Page Rank of the site that is linking to me.

Choosing between the two is not that black and white however. UAW has far superior capabilities in terms of reporting, scheduling, and the tools needed to build resource boxes. BB, has no reporting whatsoever (odd!) and the interface is extremely simple (limited?).

The two niche sites that I used in this test have both made sales. The video game site (which I used Blog Blueprint for) is in a an extremely competitive niche and made its first sale 40 days after I launched it. In the first week since the first sale, it has racked up sales of just shy of $1000. The mountain biking site took only 30 days to make a sale, and thus far has sold just over $100 worth of product.

Does that mean Blog Blueprint is better than Unique Article Wizard, or vice versa? That's a tough call at this point. They both cost about the same ($57 and $67 per month, respectively) and do what they say they are going to do. If I had to pick, I'd lean towards Unique Article Wizard only because I like that it has reporting built in and I can determine exactly where my articles are being published. Blog Blueprint is kind of a black box, in comparison.

Until I can gather more data, I intend to continue to use both.

Conclusion

Now that I have documented my procedures and found a VA on oDesk, launching a site takes me well less than a day. In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that I invest 2-3 hours of my time to launch the site.

Once it is launched, I let my VA run my promotion systems for at least 30 days and I keep tabs on my analytics during that time.

When I'm convinced that the site's traffic trend is positive and I've seen a few sales, I will then put more of my time into studying conversions and running split tests. I will blog about that in a future post, so be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don't miss it.

My Site A Week Gameplan

Some time ago I read a post in the War Room by a guy who said he had 235 sites; each of which ranked in the top 5 for its keyword without any web 2.0 feeders (no twitter, no hubpages, no squidoo, no EzineArticles). 10 of his sites make $50 a day, and the other 225 sites earn an average of $4/day. That totals just over $511,000 per year. Not too shabby. The key to his plan was to outsource everything and to have a large number of sites.

His plan got me thinking. If I could makes sites that made $4/day each and I could build one a week, by the end of 52 weeks I'd be making $208 per day, or just under $76,000 per year. And guess what? It would likely only continue to grow from there.

If I could get really efficient and launch two sites a week, I'm at $416 per day within a year. Now its getting interesting.

The KEY is coming up with systems that will allow you to manage a 104 websites. Without the systems, you are a dead duck. So, with that in mind, I started to build my systems right from the very start. You can do that same, and you should be!

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IMPORTANT UPDATE
Since writing this post I have learned of some more efficient backlinking strategies and I will be posting about these in the near future on my blog.

Hope this helps,

Trent