Next Month
Introduction
Welcome month one of my 12 month case study on growing a website from scratch to 50k/month.
1. Who Am I?
I am a self-taught online marketer who up until very recently (more on this later) made his entire income from a portfolio of websites. These websites were monetized through various affiliate schemes
This is an industry I know inside out. This case study is to share some of my expertise as well as keeping me on track and motivated.
2. Why Affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a low barrier to entry, low overhead career that can even be set up to run passively. As you can imagine with those bold claims, it is a VERY saturated industry. Even more so than the tee-shirt niche.
Affiliate marketing is a great starting point for beginners who want to dip their toes into online marketing. The wide range of skills you will need (and by association learn) are transferrable to other industries, even if your attempt is a failure. After all, Everything needs to be marketed. It doesn’t matter whether you are doing a physical product or even a service, marketing is a huge part of any industry.
3. So you are just another guru?
Nope. I am not trying to sell you anything
Unfortunately affiliate marketing is an industry plagued by “Gurus” like Pat Flynn and Spencer Hawes. People like this make most of their income from “showing you how to do affiliate marketing successfully” rather than actually earning money through their websites. More often than not, the readers of these blogs know more about affiliate marketing than the guru themselves.
Trust me on this, the people who are actually earning good money from affiliate schemes are the ones that want to keep it a secret. While I will talk openly about all facets of affiliate marketing, one thing I will not reveal is my websites and the entire earnings they bring me.
The Case Study
My case study will be a 12 month look at creating a website from scratch and earning an income through one of the most basic of affiliate schemes; Amazon Associates.
I have set myself the lofty goal of earning 50k/month by the end of December this year. Whether I succeed, or fail, I am taking you along for the ride.
I will be posting a single post at the beginning of each month. This post will recount what I have been up to for the previous month.
While I will touch on a lot of different areas, I often won’t go into detail. This is largely because there are good guides on google on just about anything a quick search away, written better and in more detail than I would have been able to. Don’t be lazy.
I want to stress, this is not a step by step guide to riches. This is simply how I have decided to go about creating a new website. Some of this case study will be relevant to you. Other parts won’t. I do not have all the answers or even most of them. Most of my success comes from testing and adapting. You would be wise to do the same.So let’s jump into it.
January 1st, 2016
The Case study kicks off. I had way too much booze in my system from the night before. New Years Eve is a cruel mistress.
Choosing a Niche
In my infinite wisdom I did not come with a niche pre-chosen. Day one saw me deciding what niche I wanted to target.I have never chosen a niche based on passions or areas where I have strong knowledge.
Every “expert” article I have read on niche research calls me wrong on this. Why would you go into a niche you know nothing about?
Because the best way to kill a passion is to associate it with work. Imagine you love driving, so you become a taxi-driver. You can love your job all you want but do you honestly think you will enjoy driving when you have your day off? Probably not. Yeah, this probably isn’t the best example I could have come up with but you get the idea.
Instead, I prefer to choose a niche based on something that I have no knowledge in but interests me. This gives me something else to learn and allows me to see a niche with a fresh set of eyes, because I do not have preconceived assumptions to bring along (Have you ever had an expert try explain something to you that is jargon heavy? They often assume you have an above basic understanding of the topic). If I can learn about a niche, I can teach others about a niche. And because I have learned more recently than “experts” in that niche, I will likely have a better idea of exactly what newcomers to a niche want to know.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret:
Just about any niche can make money.
I know someone who has a website on socks who brings in 3k/month net profit. The website is pretty poorly done and the content could definitely done better and it’s socks. SOCKS. But the guy makes bank.
So knowing this I stick with my tried and true method for choosing a niche.
MIND MAP
I grab a plain A4 sheet of paper and start scrawling. You can write down anything. Products. Audiences. Anything.
Here is a VERY basic representation of a single mind map path:
Family -> Parents -> Mom -> Raising children -> Babies -> sleeping babies -> Blankets
This is a simple column structure, family being at the top. Your mind map will be much more sprawling. As you go up the column the audience, content opportunity, money to be made and competition increases. As you go down it all decreases.
A niche could be the whole column or any part of it. Niche does not necessarily mean small.
Your mind map can have hundreds if not thousands of branches. Just keep going until something clicks.
For myself, I generally choose a niche that has products to review as well as room to push supplementary “how to” content. Seeding products with “affiliate links” through this content is where you earn your money.
Using the mind map example it would either be a baby site or a sleepwear/nursery site.
After that, it’s time to look at the keywords.
Keyword research has been done to death so I quickly skip over this bit.
Here is a great article on keyword research for your newly found niche.
http://nichehacks.com/survivalist-niche-seo-keyword-research/
Normally articles found on this site are rubbish but this guest post seems like it has a good attention to detail, more than I was prepared to write about in this post. Although it is on the survivalist niche you can take the same principles and apply them to your niche.
Add these keywords to a spreadsheet.
With your keywords in hand you will know whether or not you have a good and varied content to write about.
To get a really really rough idea of how many monthly searches you can upload your newly found keywords to Googles keyword tool (sign up with gmail needed). This will give you a rough idea of how many people are searching for each keyword/month. Keywords with 10 or so should be included in larger guides while keywords with more searches would make good whole article search topics.
Again, I stress this: If a product category exists with numerous competitors, there is a market for it.
Now we go through and look at the competition on Google.
So still using my example I would type in “best baby blankets” and look at the top ten results.
Basic top ten lists that I know I can do a better job of.
The key here is to providing VALUE. If you think you cannot do a better job than the existing websites then move on to your next keyword. The best way to make it as a brand is by providing value to your target audience.
In this case I could provide more detail (what the blankets are made of, color choices, etc.) better pictures (high res photos that don’t need to be squinted at) compile blankets in to themed sections (by color, pattern, etc.) and so on.
Congratulations, you now have your niche and an idea of the content to add.
Yeah there are other ways to find a niche, but this is how I went about it.
What I did
I scrawled my entire mindmap and nothing really stuck out. I had covered a lot of these niches (often partially) in the past and the new was not something I could spend a long time writing about, no interest whatsoever.
Having long lusted upon sites like the wirecutter and cnet, I thought:
Fuck it. I’ll review everything.
This may have been my lack of coherent thoughts due to struggling from the night before, or this may have been my actual thought process, regardless I am stuck with it now.
No coherent theme besides product categories. No supplementary guides. Just reviews. The varied product will stop me from getting bored and a good step towards that 50k/month, since reviews convert well.
Now the problem is, some of the products I would want to cover are already covered by some other sites in my portfolio. Including them would see me compete with my own websites. Neglecting them would see product categories with odd gaps on my new website.
This was a tough decision for me.
But after taking a good hard look at my previous content I was somewhat disappointed. I had built these sites to the point where they were mostly run by VA’s. But with that hands off approach, many of these guides and reviews had become dated or not given as much love as I would have given them myself.
I felt like I had rested on my laurels and thought I could do much better.
So with that I set about selling all the sites in my portfolio. (I refuse to use sites like Flippa and empire flippers, instead lawyering up).
As I type this I have the last two sites being finalized with the respective buyers, the rest were all bought by a single buyer. I will not be disclosing the sites, their earn or the amount they sold for since they don’t really have anything to do with this case study.
Now I know I could have done anything else with these sites, even 301’ed them to the new one. But after weighing up all my options, I decided my best bet was to sell them outright for a fat wad of cash.
That cash will NOT be used on this website. Truth be told, this is more of the same for me and if this site fails then that will be me distancing myself from affiliate marketing for good and using the funds to finance another side project. This is my last hoorah, so hopefully I can go out with a bang. At the time of writing this I have no intention of creating another affiliate website.
But I digress…
The reason I settled on reviews is that they are one of the last hurdles in the buying process that a consumer will leap before buying. A consumer is reading a review because they either want to confirm that this is the product for them or if it isn’t, be directed to a product that is.
Because this step is closest to the end purchase, conversions are generally better than a standard information website. But you know what that means… More competition.
I will now touch on how I went about other vital parts of setting up a website:
Hosting
So now it’s time to choose hosting. Most of my other websites were hosted on Pantheon (no real complaints) but this time I am going with Digital Ocean, giving me the absolute freedom to do whatever I want. A $10/month plan and I was away (I can scale as the site grows).
Now for many of you, managing your own infrastructure will be a little confusing. So when starting out I would recommend shared or VPS hosting
These have simple control panels with one click wordpress installs (the Content Management System the majority of the internet uses).
With hosting you definitely get what you pay for. There are plenty of good guides out there for understanding hosting terminology.
SSL
Yep, I am going to implement something I have never done before. Roll out site wide SSL (the HTTPS you see in the URL bar). Why start now? LetsEncrypt.org has entered open Beta and allows you to generate free SSL Certificates for your website. FREEEEEE!
This is quite technical and for those of you who do not understand the process should hold off implementing it. Since Auttomatic (the people behind wordpress) are a major sponsor of it, it is likely that there will be a very simple way to use this just around the corner (likely a plugin). Just wait.
While Google HAS said that this will eventually be a ranking signal, there is little to no evidence to suggest that it is currently in use for anything other than a “tie breaker” (when both sites meet an identical ranking score).
CMS
WordPress.org (NOT .com) is the best documented CMS on the web. Any problem you come across will already have been solved. There is no going past it in terms of simplicity and customizability.
Themes
It’s no secret I love studiopress themes and their genesis framework. They are well coded, easy to customize and look great. I dropped $99 for the genesis framework and it came with a free theme (actually I already had the genesis theme but for the purpose of the case study I will list it as an expense at the current market rate).
Domain Name
Whether you like it or not, your domain name will become your brand name. As a result you are also going to want to grab any social handles that line up, especially on the big ones (facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterst, G+) etc.
Here is a good service that does the checking for you:
Grab the name on the main social networks (fb twitter pinterest G+) any others that are relevant to you.
Since the domain name is your brand, choose a good name.
A good name for a kitchenware website could be a made up word like “Zaletra.com” or a generic but relevant name like “fredskitchen.com”
Avoid names like “bestblenders.com” as not only are they awful to brand but are awkward when you want to expand your offering. It doesn’t make sense to an end user to add rolling pins to a site with this name. Obviously this advice is null and void if you WANT to only make a single product website. But IMO it takes as much effort to rank a single product website as it does one covering multiple products/lifestyles, so why sell yourself short?
Also, whether you use a goodkitchen.com, a ccTLD like goodkitchen.com.au or a gTLD like good.kitchen has no impact on ranking in google. Just go with whatever works best for you. Any arguments over “.com” losing you traffic are irrelevant in the early stages since your traffic will come through search and social, not by people entering your address in the search bar.
Webmaster and analytics
Google is too big to ignore and from day one you should set up your webmaster tools and analytics and link them together. While it’s initial value may be lost on you, it won’t be too long before you find it useful. By setting it up on day one you have access to all the metrics from when you first start, which may provide valuable insight in the months to come.
Setting up the website
With all the above sorted it is now time to tinker on your theme. I try to avoid plugins where possible since they slow down your website.However, there are some plugins that are definitely worth looking into IMO.
- W3 total cache – easy browser caching
- Simple social share – Good looking social icons without the bloat.
- Akismet – spam blocker
- Contact form 7 – for contact forms
- Mailpoet – syncs with mailchimp for easy email lists
All of these are free plug-ins. Some work on donations while others have “premium options” you must pay for. If you want a paid do it all form plugin, I cannot recommend gravity forms enough.So I messed around with the theme CSS of the theme until I was happy with the colors, content area size, font’s headings and more.
Here is a great video on how to tweak themes yourself (example is a studiopress theme).
For the logo I just put two letters in a circle to match the color theme and domain name of the site. This is a place holder. This early in the game your brand has no klout. People are coming to your website for your amazing content you are going to create, not because of brand awareness. Wasting time on a logo here is pointless. We can fix this up when our site starts earning.
Don’t forget to set your logo as the favicon (The little icon that appears on the page tab).
I also removed the blatant link back to studiopress in the footer of the theme, something many people leave in.
Content
Okay, so while it may seem like a lot to do, setting up the whole site just took less than a day. I have done this before and do not like to waste too long on it. Content is where it’s at. You can’t attract visitors (and as a result earn money) without it.
So my aim was to create 30 articles in January.
5 reviews each across 6 different categories. This is where the bulk of my time was spent.
But my goal was to set this website up with minimal spend. How can I create a review site that adds value without physically reviewing a product?
By reading and compiling reviews myself. Amazon has a wealth of reviews, the problem with this is that most of them are fake. You cannot trust the 5 star reviews and the 1 star reviews are often competitors. So as a generalization I would only consider the 3 star reviews from amazon.
This is where most set and forget affiliate websites stop their research. But the emphasis here is on value. So I continued to research on sites like walmart, target etc. Since these sites do not reward products with higher rankings based on reviews, they are often more accurate.
But I am not done yet, there is more to be learned about the product. So I took up all the points that were brought up in the reviews and went to talk to people in forums about them. Trust me on this, there is a forum for EVERYTHING, not just here on reddit.
But what about photos? You can’t have a review without photos. Here is where the MARKETING kicks in. You HAVE to think outside the box . I came up with two methods of getting photos that have not been used (well at least not publicly documented online) before. Let’s take a look at the first method.
From the same forums I would identify who had the product and ask them if they could take photos with their camera from certain angles and email them to me. Sometimes I would offer a $10 amazon gift card to sweeten the deal. Every product you are going to review has already been bought and tested by someone else. Take advantage of it. I would also ask for their opinion on the product and any quirks they experienced (More info for my review).
It’s amazing just how good photos from mobile phones are these days. A quick touch up through photoshop (or pixlr a free browser based editor) and just like that you have a unique product photos that look a million times better than the stock photos those other “review affiliate sites” are trying to pass off .
And repeat. 30 more times.
Now you may be thinking:
That’s a fucking lot of work just for some content.
And you would be right.
But awesome content takes work and is much easier to use in outreach than your run of the mill stock-photo filled website.
For those of you wondering why I bothered to go to the extent of tracking down custom photos, it would have cost me in excess of $9000 for all that product. I got around 580ish usable photos (some were odd angles or were blurry and out of focus) for my website for a little over $120. And it’s all original content. A little over 20 cents/photo Bargain!
So my value add is thoroughly researched products with original photos. Some photos are even of the product being used. Perfect.I might add that if a overwhelming majority of people thought a feature of a product was shit, I conveyed that in my review.But I wasn’t done yet.
My next step was to get some better quality photos. So off to alibaba I went. Now I am sure that just about every single one of you reading this is aware that alibaba is a huge marketplace for counterfeit goods. I decided to use this to my advantage.
I set up an account and tracked down factories that “supplied” the product I had reviewed. From here I would engage the company and after some back and forth would ask for sample photos. Wanting my business, They provided me with photos of the product from all different angles on a white background free of charge.
While the products were almost certainly of poor quality when used, they looked identical to the real thing in the photos. And that’s all that was needed.
I then mixed these photos in the reviews where applicable. Just like that my review site was coming together.
This is just the starting point (MVP) and if my website gets to an earning stage then I will be purchasing the product to review myself with the money brought in from the website as well as using the advice from u/Free_willy99 and leveraging my site for free reviews – this will come much later. But part of the fun of building this for me is being resourceful and spending as little money as possible. I am entirely self taught and if I can do it then so can you.
I currently have no pricing tables, no big “buy now links”. This is deliberate. During the early stages of outreach I don’t want to be written off for another “affiliate website”. If influencers only read as far as the comparison table then it is likely that is the assumption they will make.
A mixed review site is probably one of the hardest to market due to the lack of focus on a single topic and will DEFINITELY hurt me when I begin my outreach next month.I have covered different styles of affiliate websites here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3rgdby/7_different_styles_of_affiliate_websites_a/
One or a mixture of those may work better for you.
So after my first month I have a fully functional website, 45 reviews (beat out my target) and from all outside appearances my website looks like the real deal. Most importantly, it is miles better than the competition in terms of VALUE.
traffic
I’ll be honest with you, as I type this I have not yet looked at my analytics. I don’t even know if I’m appearing in search yet or not and couldn’t care less.
Why?
Because at this stage they mean nothing. I have performed no outreach and it is likely that any search standing (if any) is just google throwing my site around on page 3+ against random long tail search terms.
Seeing no progress is demotivating and I have no intention of putting myself through it when I am in the middle of writing 45 big-ass reviews.
This month (February) will see the first look at the analytics as well as the beginning of outreach.
Earnings
Much to my surprise, I actually sold two products during my first month. Now it is worth mentioning that neither of these products are even closely related to anything I have reviewed, so it was more dumb luck than anything I can pin down to a success right now. I would be just as happy with progress if I had not made a sale this month, this is just the beginning.
From what I can tell, the purchases came through the forums. As I have been talking about products and tracking photos I have also been dropping links to my reviews here and there where relevant. Just because you are doing something like chasing down photos doesn’t mean you have to stop marketing. EVERY SINGLE PERSON you talk to from the moment you start your website is a networking opportunity.
Now you may have noticed that the clicks seem abnormally high. This is me testing my links. Every time I create a link, I click through to test it. This counts as a “visit” on amazon’s shitty metrics. If I was to remove my clicks, based on tracking, I would have roughly 35 unique clicks through to amazon (some of this number was definitely bot traffic). It’s too early to tell whether my conversion funnel is set out correct and what not. All this can be adjusted when I get more visitors to play with.So my costs so far:
- Domain name $10
- Hosting: $120 (yearly)
- Studiopress theme $99 (one off cost)
- Photos $122
Total costs to date: $351Earnings to date: $9.23Total: $-341.77Woo. In the red. But that is to be expected.The plan for February is that my time will be split between 25% outreach and 75% content creation. Stay tuned.
EDIT: While it may seem like this was all easy reading a summary of what I have achieved, I cannot stress enough the grind that this month was. It was downright @#$%ing boring. Writing 45 pieces of content sucks. Reaching out and sourcing photos sucks. Setting up a new website for the millionth time sucks. Affiliate marketing is hard and boring work.
