building up an affiliate business one site at a time?
Submitted by jlc on Sun, 05/20/2007 - 21:19.
Hi Jeremy,
I understand that you now have more than 100 sites. When you were starting out, did you focus your energies on a single site until it was profitable? Or did you work on multiple sites at any given time and wait to see which ones would work out?
Thanks. Janna
Good question!
I've been wondering the same thing.
:? :?:
I think we've seen similar threads elsewhere on this forum, and I think the general consensus is that it's a best practice to work on a site until it is profitable or shows that it will never be profitable before starting up more sites.
My personal experience is that I aimed to build a site per week when I first started out about eight months ago. I wanted to get to the level that Jeremy was at. Eight months later, I operate exactly two sites with a total of about 100 landing pages. These pages are performing reasonably well and take my whole PPC budget every month :D
I think my business has grown much faster this way than if I had tried to force out new sites each week. I would suggest finding something that works and scaling it as large as possible before moving on to new sites and products.
Mike
Thanks for the reply!
Quick question: You have two sites with about 100 landing pages. Are you
promoting 100 different products or are you promoting one or two products
and each landing page is made to match your AdWord keywords and text?
Hi Janna,
When I first started out I only had one site. In fact, I worked on only a handful of sites my entire first year. It wasn't until my second year that I started to scale the business by building more sites.
Also keep in mind that many of the sites are in related categories/niches and leverage the same database(s) and templates. It probably sounds overwhelming to hear one person building and managing one hundred plus sites, but with a little automation and programming knowledge anybody could do it.
Here are some examples -
http://www.xbox-360-rentals.com
http://www.wii-rentals.com
http://www.ps3-rentals.com
http://www.ps2-rentals.com
GreenGiant has good advice about keeping your focus narrow and getting the most out of your existing sites before starting something new.
Best,
Jeremy
Looking at your sites for rental games, they're great! Where do you get your pictures of the products (like the PSP game covers) you use on the site? Also, using the logos of wii or xbox, do you get permission to copy, or do they have a stock you use and how do you get those?
thanks
Bob
Bob,
I am pretty sure the pictures rather, the picture's URL is included in the data feed Jeremy is getting from GameFly (the merchant). Jeremy will be covering data feeds in week 2 of The Black Ink Project.
Cheers,
Jason Woods
Follow me on Twitter
All of the game covers, etc. come from the product datafeed. The graphics on the home page(s) are custom - made with cheap stock photos on iStock and a little Fireworks Magic ;)
Each landing page promotes a different product, but I'm only working with a total of three merchants right now. Each page has it's own ad group.
Jeremy, thanks for the reply here. I'm hoping to get to ask you a few questions about scaling the business in person at Affiliate Summit :D Specifically, your use of databases is something that I'm a total newbie at.
Mike
Oh one more thing - Jeremy, do you do any outsourcing of landing page development? If so, are you willing to part with any names for recommendations?
Thanks!
Mike
I'll definitely put that on the agenda! A lot of people seem interested in that.
I develop most of my own landing pages. I've had some help in the past from top designers like Dustin Hassard - http://www.brandfly.com, but for the most part I in-source it to myself ;)
I try to outsource only the parts of the business that I'm not really good at. For example, I've outsourced some complex coding projects before. Not because I couldn't figure it out for myself, but I knew that somebody else could do it faster and better, which would cost me less money.
When it comes to landing page design, I'm very selective and have a hard time outsourcing it.
Best,
Jeremy
P.S. Dustin is going to be creating some Joomla templates for resale soon. I'll keep you posted on that project.
I have a guy in India I've been working with for about 4 years. Whenever I had too many web sites to design, I would send him the overflow. He might be able to help you. He's a great and very talented designer. The time difference can be a little bit of a pain, but he’s reliable and the price is right.
James
Hi James,
Care to share the name of your Indian designer friend, as I am looking for someone to do some designing work for me currently.
Thanks.
wave
Sure, I'll PM you the information.
James
Hello James,
Hope you don't mind but can you please share the name of your Indian designer friend to me as well?
Thanks,
Mike
Mike,
It's been a while since I visited this post, but I have a few questions I hope
that you or someone could answer for me.
Let's say that I decide to promote Zune products.:shock:
I create a new domain called "www.stuff-for-your-zune.com" (for lack of
a better domain name)
I then create one landing page for Zune cases. The landing page has 4-5
reviews of the best cases with my affiliate links. I set up my Google
AdWords group to advertise zune cases and direct people to this landing
page.
I do the same thing for other Zune products: cables, screen protectors,
and the zune itself. Each sub-category has its own unique landing page
located on the above domain and each landing page has its own Google
Ad group. This way, I'm promoting many products each with its own
landing page but I'm only using one domain.
Is this correct?
Also, do you link all the landing pages together so if someone was
originally looking for cases and sees the link for cables they can click
and view the cable's landing page?
I know that this is a lot, but any answers would help to clear up my
confusion!
Thanks!
David :D
Hi David,
Sorry for the very late reply, I somehow missed this post. I hope you were able to find the answers to these questions, but if not, I'll do my best to offer some advice here.
I think the plan you describe is sound. Having a domain that is keyword rich and targeted will probably help your CTR. Then, a landing page for each product genre is generally a good idea. However, I might take it a step further. I would make a separate landing page for each individual product model and then create an ad group for that product that sends traffic to that very specific landing page. That way you can use very specific keywords that may have less competition and will probably convert better since they are "buy" keywords. You might end up having a separate landing page for each brand and model of Zune case, but then you are giving the searcher exactly what they are looking for. That should result in the highest conversion rate. I would also then add links to each landing page that point to your other landing pages or a genre landing page, in case the searcher gets to your page and wants to check out some other models.
I'm experimenting now with buying a separate domain for each individual product I'm promoting. Paying $6 per domain can get pricey, but I usually make that money back pretty quick. I'm hoping that having the specific keywords in my domain will improve CTR and will help me with my SEO efforts as well. Since the most recent Google slap, I've been developing more complete sites around each product to try to avoid future slaps.
I can't guarantee any of this will work for any specific product, but it all makes sense to me :D
Mike
Thanks!
That was just what I was looking for!
Jeremy,
I'm also very interested in learning about how you use databases. Do you use datafeeds? I'm working with a merchant that has tons of products similar to your xbox games, but it's taking me forever to build the landing pages with all the pics and links.
I know there are much faster ways with databases. What's the best way to learn and is there software that you use to work with datafeeds?
Thanks,
Take a look at some examples from my gaming site -
Browse Games
http://www.xbox-360-rentals.com/browse.php
Game Pages
http://www.xbox-360-rentals.com/game.php?game_id=3881
http://www.xbox-360-rentals.com/game.php?game_id=3316
http://www.xbox-360-rentals.com/game.php?game_id=144
You will note there are hundreds of games that all use the same page (game.php). With a little PHP and some database magic you can build hundreds, or even thousands of pages with just a few lines of code. In fact, the pages referenced above have only 10-20 lines of PHP code.
My recommendation for anybody wanting to learn how to work with databases to build a dynamic site is to use Dreamweaver CS3. It has several pre-built scripts that allow you to automagically build dynamic sites. If you really want to master the craft grab a book like Dreamweaver CS3 bible:
http://www.amazon.com/Dreamweaver-CS3-Bible-Joseph-Lowery/dp/0470122145
Back in 2000 I knew absolutely nothing about building dynamic sites. I discovered Dreamweaver UltraDev 4 (now version CS3) and was able to quickly learn how to build database driven sites. Most of the time I didn't even know what the code in the background was doing - I just used the server behaviors built into the software.
The software is not cheap, but think about how much time you're spending piecing the site together one page at a time. If you leveraged the merchant's datafeed and learned how to put it together with Dreamweaver you could save weeks. The learning curve is a little steep at first, but after getting your hands dirty you'll be able to pick it up fairly easily.
Best,
Jeremy
I think I need to start niche sites. Currently I just have one site and its getting too big for me to update. My site started out as a banner farm. Now its a combination of a coupon site and shopping site.
I second the DW recommendation. It makes creating dynamic sites so easy. I created an online gallery using UltraDev (as it was known a few years ago) and I knew nothing about the code being created. The software wrote all the necessary ASP code for me. I had to create the Access database but that's about as technical as it got.
I toyed with the idea of learning php but, after having tried, realized php just doesn't like me! Recently, I've returned to using Dreamweaver. You might have heard rumors about DW not writing clean code or adding extraneous code to your pages. That used to be true in former version of the application. I think I'm correct in saying DW CS3 writes very clean code and doesn't make any alterations at all to 'help you out'.
Another great book for learning Dreamweaver CS3 is this one: http://tinyurl.com/63wlhy (not an aff link)
I have a successful website not affiliate and have tried many different affiliate programs. The only one which helped me to gain success is the Network marketing.
Network Marketing – Social Networking, Social Entrepreneurship, Internet Marketing, Social Network Marketing. Humanitarian Business
It is always better to do marketing for one site at a time, Otherwise you will loose your time and money.
Hey Guys,
What Jeremy said about adding hundreds of pages of dynamic content to your site is right on the money.
My site has a large number of customers looking for items that were once popular but can no longer be gotten retail - ie first edition books
So what I did with my Wordpress site is use it as a CMS with pages for my content instead of blog posts. My pages are "product categories" where I write my own content but then I easily and quickly add a feed to ebay auctions with a free plugin called Feedsnap. It gives me a huge product list and lots of extra "free" constantly changing fresh content without having to make any changes myself.
How did I accomplish this? Easy...I installed the plugin to my Wordpress installation, activated it, and on pages where I want the feed I input the code
[feedsnap] here is where I put the ebay feed [/feedsnap]
and that's all there is to it. No coding, no hassles and those looking for products in my categories find me on the first page of Google and click through takes them directly to the auctions where they can look for hundreds of products. This works for more than just ebay feeds, the possibilities are probably endless.
Just thought I'd pass on that tip folks :)