4 Months In - Here's what I did and the results

by 59 replies
68
SUMMARY
I started IM in earnest back in mid-December. I decided to focus on a single site during my spare time as I do have a day job. Following is an overview of what I did and the results:

I had a domain that was 3 years old with no content. The domain has the word "review" in it. The domain is a .com. I decided to create a review site and link out to affiliates.

ACTIONS
I set-up Wordpress as my CMS.

I purchased the InReview theme from Elegantthemes and deployed to the site.

I created an account on Twitter and Facebook. Each post that goes live automatically gets posted to Twitter. Twitter in turns auto posts to Facebook.

I set-up a form to create a list hosted on aweber. I put the form in the right column of the website. Yesterday, I installed the lightbox form on all the single post pages. (Wow!)

I signed up for
- Amazon affiliates
- CJ
- ShareASale

I researched products via Amazon to find those selling in the range of $100-$300 and downloaded product photos.

I hired a Warrior to write 20 reviews for 20 different products. Each review was to be 1000 words and have a KW density of 2-3%. The keyword is the product name.

I started writing blog posts to go on the blog section of the site. I targeted 300 words with keywords targeting the niche category.

I hired a writer via oDesk to write 100 BMR articles. About 25 of the articles were released before they shut down. I requested that all my articles be removed from their network.

I hired someone via oDesk to create a couple of Squidoo lens' and Hubpages targeting the niche category.

I did some blog commenting. I learned a lot here as many of my comments were removed. Even though I wrote relevant posts, I also added my link to my comment. I also registered the username that was my domain. I'm modifying this strategy.

I hired someone via oDesk to do social bookmarking. The bookmarks were for each of my product review pages.

RESULTS
SEO: I'm on page 1, position 4 for the primary keyword of the site "Best blah blah Reviews".

SEO: I'm disappointed with my individual review pages. None are on page one. The 18 of the 22 reviews are on page 2 or page 3 of Google for the product name.

Traffic: Traffic is improving. I'm not sure if these results are great or not, but I feel as if they could be better. See the attached file from Google Analytics.

Earnings: $116 so far in April, all from Amazon. More than double March. See the screenshot. I'm beginning to experiment with placement of links. Two weeks ago I de-emphasized links from CJ and ShareASale as they did not have any sales.

Email List: I had 6 subscribers until April 23. Yesterday, after I installed the lightbox, I now have 9 subscribers.


NEXT STEPS

Content: I will continue to add content on a weekly basis, both reviews and blog posts.

Email List: I'll send out my first newsletter next week around the first of May. I won't sell anything, just provide some pointers and links to online resources for my niche.

SEO: I'm lacking in a strategy here. I will continue with the blog commenting and forum posting. However, I need to explore article marketing and social media marketing.

Any suggestions for article and social marketing?

Earnings: I am considering dropping CJ and ShareASale links and focusing on Amazon. Any ideas for how to increase earnings? Maybe selling related products? I'm not sure.


I want to thank the Warrior Forum. This community has been a big help. Granted, $100 a month is just a pittance compared to most of you, but it is my start. Next is $100 a week.
#main internet marketing discussion forum #amazon #months #noob #results #review
  • For some reason, the attachments didn't show up. Hopefully I've attached them correctly here.
  • Nice post man! I like reading other newbies post that are making some cash! Inspires me to try harder! $100 a month is the goal I am trying to reach. Looks like you have been on the right track to achieve that goal. I am sure $100 a week will come good job man!
  • Its always good to hear success stories. Whatever you are doing seems to be working. Lot of people get bored after while and go into comfort zone. Best advice I can give you is to keep going and never stop. Best wishes
  • Hi Jay,

    Your on the right track. Now scale up! The key is to test everything you possible can to see what works, trash what doesn't then scale up again.

    There's many ways to skin the cat.

    • [1] reply
    • Great post Jay - you are on your way! Turn that $100 a month into $100 a week with some more hard work. After that you can then turn that into much more per week. The trick is you have to keep working at this and you cannot stop.
  • Great work Jay... Hard work pays off...

    There is a season for everything, there is a season for work and there is a season to reap the benefits from your work. It's your reaping season.

    Keep on doing what you are doing. Stay focuseed, rinse and repeat. Double, triple and quadruple your earnings in the coming months...

    Wishing you great success...
    Dr.Spencer Jones
  • great post have also picked up some iydeas many thanks
  • Great work, the next thing you should do is replicate what's working and avoid what's not working..

    you should provide VALUE to your email subscribers and build a reputation.

    try youtube marketing and article marketing. they will work like magic for any niche
  • Hi Jay,

    Nice work! May I ask which plug in you use to update your FB and Twitter accounts?

    Thanks,

    Richard
  • Awesome work! Keep it up. Even I am really grateful to WF for introducing me to so many varied facets of IM.
  • Excellent post. Thanks for sharing.
  • By request, here are the plug-ins I have installed for wordpress...

    Akismet: comes with WP, used to cut down on spam comments

    All in One SEO Pack: I use this for custom titles, keywords, descriptions

    cbnet Ping Optimizer: This is so that all my page updates do not spam ping services

    Contact Form 7: my contact form

    Google XML Sitemaps: Builds a sitemap per Google's specs

    Pretty Link Lite: used to cloak my affiliate links

    ShareThis: puts social sharing icons on each post

    WP to Twitter: when a post goes live, this will auto-post to Twitter

    That's it. If anyone has additional plug-ins, please share.
  • Great job!! I just started and your post inspires me, thanks.
  • Congrats on your success. Here's to more - and keep us updated.
  • Well done and thanks for sharing exactly what you did.

    When you eventually send an email to your subscribers with a product to sell/promote, what will you offer?
  • Congrats on the succes!

    Just one thing, I would advise you to not cloak your links using Pretty Link, as this is against Amazon rules.

    Keep going,
    Frederik Jørgensen
  • Very cool....keep working with your strategies and tracking your results. If everything works and you find a formula you like, then you can create an ebook with it and sell it as a WSO or on your own website.

    Benjamin
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • Actually, $100/month is a fortune compared to most of us!
  • This is a ok strategy.

    Just scale it up to to the max.
  • Congrats dude you're on the right path. I'm confident that you'll be able to turn your business into a $100/week business relatively quickly if you keep marketing your site hard.
  • This is really great! I'm glad that you have found success for yourself and $100 per month is nothing to laugh at!

    Keep putting in the effort ad eventually you'll be crushing it! The important thing is that you have taken action and not just sat on your butt!
  • Awesome! So NICE to hear of an IM not giving up after a few months because they're not earning $1000 a day! Keep it up buddy and you'll reap the rewards!

    Best wishes

    Rob
  • This is great. I love hearing success stories. I'm sure with a solid backlinking strategy you will achieve the rankings you are currently looking for. it's only small step from page 2 to page 1. I would just keep reinvesting the money you make from it back into the site
  • Nice work man. You found a simple system that works and you worked on it until it started making you some money. Now you're making more and more money with it and if you keep scaling it you'll keep making more money.
  • Good work. I am interested in your traffic information from Analytics, so could you by any chance post that?
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for all the positive comments everyone. It keeps me going. I had a sick day at work today, which is why I'm active here. But, I also wrote 2 blog posts for the site and posted about 20 forum replies with links back to my site this afternoon.


      I posted the main summary from Analytics. Did that not come through? (see the second post in this thread) Is there anything else you are interested in seeing?
      • [1] reply
  • That's very good to hear. It's awesome that you actually work at a day job and spend your free time doing IM. And sounds like you are actually taking it seriously, so good luck keep up a good work and you will definitely will make decent money Online!
  • You're on the right track...congrats on the initial success. It's now time to put things into overdrive!
  • Thanks for sharing
    You are off to a great start to making money on line.
  • Here's a breakdown of total traffic from April 18-24.

    Direct: 6.69%

    Referrals: 1.47%

    Paid Search: 0%

    Organic Search: 91.84%

    Yikes! I'm in trouble if Google decides to penalize me. That's why I'm researching article marketing and how to improve traffic from social networks.
    • [1] reply
    • Well I think you'll be fine if you have high quality, original articles on your website. I could be wrong, but I think that Google will only ever penalize sites, in any algorithm change, that use other methods (besides high quality article publication) for SEO purposes. Like excessive backlinking, extremely high keyword density, etc.

      I'm sure you're site will be fine. But great job!
  • Congratz Jay, keep up the good work!
    Anyway, for your question about article marketing, take a look at this twenty websites related to getting people to write for you , or you getting paid writing !

    1. Article Marketing, Free Content & High Quality Backlinks
    2. Triond - Publish Writing, Poetry, Music, Video & Content Online
    3. iWriter : Article Writing Service | Get Content For Your Website, Cheap!
    4. The Online Community for Writers - Writing.Com
    5. ONLINE WRITING JOBS - Freelance Writing Jobs
    6. http://elance.com
    7. Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com
    8. http://www.NeedanArticle.com/
    9. LookingForClues - Free articles of insight and entertainment!
    10. http://helium.com(marketplace)
    11. Sponsored Listings
    12. Xomba
    13. http://mashable.com
    14. http://webcontent.com
    15. http://webarticles.com
    16. http://SportsArticles.com
    17. http://ArticleFit.com
    18. http://ArticleGrow.com
    19. http://MarketingArticles.com
    20. http://ArticleJone.com

    and many, many more, but these are the ones I recommend. Anyway, the best one is still freelancers.com.
    The websites I gave you, you don't necessarily have to be the one selling articles, you can get others to write articles for you too! They are cheap and handy for article marketing , so you might wanna give it a try !


    Hope I helped, good luck Jay!
  • Congratz Jay, keep up the good work!
    Anyway, for your question about article marketing, take a look at this twenty websites related to getting people to write for you , or you getting paid writing !

    1. Article Marketing, Free Content & High Quality Backlinks
    2. Triond - Publish Writing, Poetry, Music, Video & Content Online
    3. iWriter : Article Writing Service | Get Content For Your Website, Cheap!
    4. The Online Community for Writers - Writing.Com
    5. ONLINE WRITING JOBS - Freelance Writing Jobs
    6. http://elance.com
    7. Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com
    8. http://www.NeedanArticle.com/
    9. LookingForClues - Free articles of insight and entertainment!
    10. http://helium.com(marketplace)
    11. Sponsored Listings
    12. Xomba
    13. http://mashable.com
    14. Web Content
    15. http://webarticles.com
    16. http://SportsArticles.com
    17. http://ArticleFit.com
    18. http://ArticleGrow.com
    19. http://MarketingArticles.com
    20. http://ArticleJone.com

    and many, many more, but these are the ones I recommend. Anyway, the best one is still freelancers.com.
    The websites I gave you, you don't necessarily have to be the one selling articles, you can get others to write articles for you too! They are cheap and handy for article marketing , so you might wanna give it a try !


    Hope I helped, good luck Jay!
  • Jay, Nice to hear your success story! As always taking ACTION would obviously lead to results. Congratulations for materializing your goal!
  • Congratz Jay, keep up the good work!
    Anyway, for your question about article marketing, take a look at this twenty websites related to getting people to write for you , or you getting paid writing !

    1. Article Marketing, Free Content & High Quality Backlinks
    2. Triond - Publish Writing, Poetry, Music, Video & Content Online
    3. iWriter : Article Writing Service | Get Content For Your Website, Cheap!
    4. The Online Community for Writers - Writing.Com
    5. ONLINE WRITING JOBS - Freelance Writing Jobs
    6. http://elance.com
    7. Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com
    8. http://www.NeedanArticle.com/
    9. LookingForClues - Free articles of insight and entertainment!
    10. http://helium.com(marketplace)
    11. Sponsored Listings
    12. Xomba
    13. http://mashable.com
    14. http://webcontent.com
    15. http://webarticles.com
    16. http://SportsArticles.com
    17. http://ArticleFit.com
    18. http://ArticleGrow.com
    19. http://MarketingArticles.com
    20. http://ArticleJone.com

    and many, many more, but these are the ones I recommend. Anyway, the best one is still freelancers.com.
    The websites I gave you, you don't necessarily have to be the one selling articles, you can get others to write articles for you too! They are cheap and handy for article marketing , so you might wanna give it a try !


    Hope I helped, good luck Jay!
  • Awesome, that is a huge accomplishment!
  • Really great job, Jay. $100 per month is something that most people on this forum couldn't achieve yet. Your attitude should be inspiring for them.

    Since you're looking for alternative traffic methods, I'd like to add that guest blogging and Pinterest are highly popular these days
    • [1] reply
    • good work, looks like you're on the road to success

      may i ask for a rough idea of investment

      i guess your most expensive gig was getting a warrior to write 20 articles of 1,000 words - that must have cost a bit?
      • [1] reply
  • Well done man, youve really sat down and drew up a plan of action! You have done much better than me in my first 4 months thats for sure lol. Scale up and keep motivated!

    Dan J
  • I am also going to add that once you figure out exactly what is making you money, reinvest what you've earned in to a second site to double (or more) your income. Scale it up!
  • Looks like you know what you are doing. A programmer during the day? Good job. I mean, well done, what you did and doing. Funny how some people call it "hard work", though.

    Be careful with the sitemaps plugin -- it re-generates full sitemap on every post, so when you have many posts it may slow down your MySql server, and the hosting people may suspend your account. It's ugly. You can write a little snippet to kill processes that run for more than, say 5 seconds. But, in my experience, you don't really need sitemaps, especially with WP -- everything is interlinked pretty thoroughly.

    I am surprised that some Warriors are making under $100/month. It's ok for a domain management business ("you are today's winner!"), but not if you put any amount of work into it.

    Also, I wonder, if someone can explain to me what do you mean "scale it up"? Start pumping money into it? Make ten clone websites? Maybe you guys actually mean "diversify"?
  • Congratulations Jay!

    That is inspiring! If you can pull this off while working a day job I think anyone can begin to make some extra money using these methods. Of course I think your focus and persistence helped a lot, so I congratulate you on staying the course and not getting sidetracked by all the information out there.

    If this is something that you want to replicate I would recommend possibly selling this site on Flippa once you get the rankings up for the individual pages. You can rinse and repeat with a new domain and niche, but I wouldn't blame you one bit if you wanted to keep the passive income flowing!

    Earlier today someone in one of my Skype groups recommended the SEO Doctor Firefox plugin, which might help you figure out some SEO factors that might be missing from your site, as well as giving you the ability to assess your competitors on the other keywords. I wish you much success, Jay! Keep up the great work.
  • Good stuff man.

    You've got to celebrate every step along the way...

    But I also think it's good to stay dissatisfied.

    If you are happy making 100 a day you'll get stuck there.

    My first quarter (3rd Quarter of 2010) I did $204
    Last Quarter ....(1st Quarter of 2012) I did $25,035

    But that's still just the beginning. There are plenty of guys making 25K a month, or a week, or even a day... You've gotta aim high.
  • Seven quarters to get from start to $25k. Congratulations. Hopefully, I can cut off a quarter or two on my way.
  • That's not a pittance actually, you're on the right track! $100 is more than what many people would do so it's a good start. The most encouraging thing is that you are actually doing the right things.

    You should look to #1) get those other pages on page one of the SERPs, top three positions. That will bump up your traffic which in turn will increase your revenue and #2) maybe add a couple more sites over the course of the next month or so.

    For SEO, apart from forum posting, you should try to do guest posts if you can. Connect with good blogs in your niche and post comments on their posts, etc. Use a few articles to create Web 2.0 sites linking to your website. All of this will give you a little bump if your niche isn't too competitive.

    Best of luck. :-)
  • if you're making over 100 with amazon you should also install google adsense. you'd be surprised how often people will click on those ads!

    i had adsense on my site for a long time in the right sidebar and at end of every post. I then added two more ad blocks:

    a 468x90 image ad between <h1 tag> and start of article
    the long linkunit just under my top navigation (looks kind of like a sub navigation)

    doing those two things jumped my adsense up a lot! I made over $200 last month in adsense alone!

    The key is to have multiple income streams on your site. Not just one. It all adds up. Plus Amazon money isnt real money. You cant buy food or beer with it, only other amazon stuff.

    I have adsense, amazon, CJ and sell my own DVD products I made. All in all I make about:

    $150-250 adsense
    $30-100 amazon
    $12 CJ
    $40 my own DVD products.
    • [1] reply
    • A quick note here.

      I wouldn't add adsense to an amazon affiliate site.

      The simple reason being that adsense will earn you about 0.10 for a click if your lucky but your directing a visitor away from your site and potentially losing a sale on amazon worth maybe $10 to $50 in commission.

      Don't over complicate your site with adsense and stick with amazon.

      Adsense on it own with a high traffic site is fine but don't integrate affiliate review sites with adsense as you will lose money.

      regards,
      Colin.
  • I would continue alomg as you are doing.

    When you get the time read up on other methods for traffic generation but take your time as you are doing, and eventually the earnings will increase.

    Well done and good luck.
  • Hey good work Jay,

    I just received my first clickbank cheque $144.39 woohoo. ( took about 6 months)

    In regards to seo if you are time poor but still have some cash left take a look at a recent wso by luckyman2K - It could be worth a go.?

    let us know how you get on
    • [1] reply
    • looks like you're on the right track, you'll be making profits pretty soon no doubt


      have you thought about using video at all?
  • It is very good, very good to take inspiration..
  • I'm in agreement to not use AdSense. I think it distracts the user. What I may do is try to capture users who try to exit without clicking my affiliate links. I'm not sure what yet, I'll spend some time thinking about it.
    • [1] reply
    • Let us know what you come up with - I'd really be interested...
  • Nice results so far.

    One thing I would recommend is finding out how far you can scale your niche in terms of traffic. If you are already ranking on top positions for all your keywords you might want to consider this site a success and start working on another one.

    So instead of spending a lot of time trying to squeeze every penny. Set a goal of what you think your max earnings can be with that site and once you reach it. Move on to another niche. Replicate your success 10x over and and now you will have 10 sites that make 100-200$ a month on auto pilot.
  • Thanks for the info. I am trying to make a review site for my own ecommerce site and then throw in some amazon products into the mix. I was wondering, once the BMR article is written, where do you post them? Onto the review site? Slightly confused on this point.

    But thanks for all the info. I was torn on proreview or inreview and now i'll pick inreview... Kinda of confusing to install.
  • Congratulations very inspiring. You sure motivated few people around here to work harder. Thanks a lot!

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