Finally, the CMS that I designed is complete, today was the last day of debugging. The site is live, and I am officially starting the experiment. The goal of this site is to make $500/month in 1 year’s time, but I am actually aiming for $1000. Of course I will be using it to build about 10 of these affiliate stores, but the case study only revolves around the first of them. I will not reveal the niche, let alone the URL, for obvious reasons. So, today is March 23rd, and the site has the following stats.

URL: haha, you almost got me there
Products uploaded on the site: 6
Pages indexed by Google: 0
Yahoo linkdomain count: 0
Majestic SEO linkdomain: 0
SEM Rush traffic value: 0
Uniques in March: 0

My goal for the month of April is to upload 50 more products and to start the link building process.

And even though I paid a pretty hefty sum of money for this CMS, I am absolutely delighted about how it looks and feels. It is exactly as I ordered it, and it is very SEO friendly out of the box.

First of all, it has a very intuitive admin section. This was programmed in Ajax, and it allows you to manage the products on one single desktop-like screen. After the installation of the CMS, you can start adding categories and subcategories, ordering them in any way you like.

For instance, let’s say you want to build an underwear affiliate store. If you go to this page on Amazon , you see that they are ordered by brand, size, price, etc. You do the same in the admin panel. For example, you add a category called “Brand”, where you add the following subcategories: Fruit of the Loom, Calvin Klein, etc. You can name any category or subcategory exactly as you want, and you can insert as many as you want.

Then, when you add a new product, you assign categories and subcategories to it. You assign the brand, the size, the color, etc. In addition, I can assign it an image, a short description, a long description, title tag and meta tags and, of course, an affiliate link. When you click submit, the new product instantly appears on the site.

Now for the front end of the CMS. When a user comes in on the site, he can choose from the different categories and subcategories which are displayed on the left navigation bar. So let’s say he chooses the brand Fruit of the Loom. He is taken to a page that displays all the Fruit of the Loom underwear available, in a nice list, with pictures that are 125×125 and a link to the detailed description on the page. Even better (and here’s the catch), the title tag of this page will say “Fruit of the Loom Underwear”. Then, let’s say that the user chooses the color black. He will be taken to all black Fruit of the Loom underwear, and the title tag of this page will be, yes you guessed it, “Black Fruit of the Loom underwear”. And so on.

Now here’s an even more interesting part. Let’s say that one user comes on the site and chooses the color first, let’s say black, then the brand, Fruit of the Loom, and finally the price range, 0-25. Then, there’s a second user that comes on the site and chooses the price range, 0-25, the color black, and the brand, Fruit of the Loom. Normally, those two pages would have the same content, but different URLs, thus creating an internal duplicate content problem. Well, I solved this also. The URL will be the same for both of these two users, due to a system of ordering that’s established in the admin. Let’s say that the color is assigned order 1, the brand order 2 and the price range order 3. In this case, both of these users will be taken to mysite.com/black-fruit-of-the-loom-0_25-underwear, whatever the order in which they choose the selection is.

The individual page for each product has a detailed description, a call to action with the affiliate link, a large 250×250 image and of course, customizable title tag and meta tags.

Having said all this, I am going to start an experiment, using this new CMS. I am not doing this to sell the software, because that’s never going to happen. I am just doing this in order for people to see that money can be made with the Amazon affiliate program. I bought a new domain, and the goal is to make the site produce at least $500 / month, $1000 would be even better (I’d say that $1000 would be totally possible in 9-12 months). I can build a great number of these sites, the CMS is completely customizable, so it’s just a question of determination.

All that I need to worry about is link building, and since I am paying over $200/month just on link networks, I reckon this won’t be a problem either. It’s probably going to take around 1000-2000 links for this site to get to $1000/month, but I will be building them slowly and steadily, avoiding sitewide links, especially this early in the game. I will not even reveal the niche of the site, since I have been burnt before. I will be posting once a month about the progress of the website.

I will be dedicating less time to this blog. If I am ever going to reveal any money making techniques, I will do it for something in return. So what has caused this?

Some time ago I posted an article about how to build a network of niche sites that promote Amazon products. I gave one of my sites as an example. I know, never reveal your sites, but I thought: hey, come on, people won’t bother with it.

Well I guess I was wrong. My site was top 5 for its main keyword, “Hoover u5140-900” and many other variations. It brought laser targeted traffic it had conversions higher than 20%. After I published that article, I saw many copycats appearing, targeting the exact same keyword. I didn’t mind that, but I mind this: it appears that my site has disappeared completely from the SERPs, and it has been the case for 3-4 weeks now. It has clearly been reported.

It’s not that I will cry a river over a site that only targeted one product (even though very successfully). I am just making a point, about how people can be in this business. Providing high quality info in this niche is simply not worth it. From what I’ve noticed, most of the people deserve to be scammed by sites that thrive by providing false information. 99% of all the sites in the Internet Marketing niche are pure bullshit.

I have received a lot of emails from people asking me various things or simply congratulating me for the content. Like, for instance, Owen, who wrote:

“Hey Paul,

At 20 yrs old I’ve gone out on a wimb by taking this past year off from college to pursue an online career.

At this point I’m only making a few hundred inconsistent dollars per month (Feb being the 1st month to profit) through adsense and affiliate marketing, but I love every minute of my day to day ‘work’ and each dollar is more rewarding than the last.

However, I’ve been trying hard to study the consistently earning adsense websites that occasionally pass through auctions to really hone in on the formula or ’sweet spot’ for choosing not so much a niche, but more so the titles for articles within a niche.

BEFORE:
My technique for choosing titles prior to reading your article was using ‘broad’ match instead of ‘phrase’ for the adwords tool, and to check google results, I would simply use ” ” around my potential keyword title instead of the ‘allintitle:’ parameter.

The number of results in Google were less important to me than the Page Rank of the first page results as well as the number of backlinks to each site; if a search term had relatively high search volume in the adwords tool, but the first page results for that term were all PR 2,3,4 etc. I would move on.

NOW:
Now, with the ‘phrase’ match, I look for titles (phrases) that have under 1,000 volume (to increase the chances of getting traffic and clicks in a shorter time frame for that term) and are also well balanced with advertiser competition, search trends, and CPC. Again, to increase the chances of getting traffic and clicks asap, the same terms must pull up under 1,000 search results in Google using ‘allintitle:’.

The typically required link structure that’s necessary to drive organic traffic to these smaller sites I like to build is also something I’m trying to work out…about 50-60 backlinks seems about right to me. Correct me if I’m off.

I don’t mean to bombard you with questions, and I self teach as much as I can but with no professors around, it’s sometimes nice to talk to people who appear to know much more on a subject than you do!

Thanks a million for any of your input Paul

Take care,

Owen”

In the end, it’s honest and enthusiastic people like Owen that I really feel bad about when looking around at the Internet Marketing / MMO blogs.

Update:

I am not surprised by this, but other people from the web share the same opinion.
Victor Franqui at his make money online blog;
Griz at the make money online blog;
Justin at his SEO blog nails it in the head also with a great quote from Aaron Wall.

What does that have to do with link building? Well, when I do something, I tend to notice its artistic side and link building is no exception. How can link building be an art? Well, I simply see it like that and as a matter of fact, it very much resembles the act of playing a good song on the guitar for me.

Play all the right notes, and the song will reveal itself bit by bit. Similarly, get all the right links, and in the end your site will reveal itself in its full potential. Also, the more you practice, the better you get (ok, that’s a truism, because you can say that about anything).

This post could have also had another name: the difference between link building and smart link building. Google has become better at detecting spam with each passing day. I for one am very glad about this. It will separate the amateurs from the professionals. Ultimately, only people who really know what they are doing will stand a fighting chance. So how do you do smart link building? How do you fine tune your website in such a way that it will be a success in the end?

First of all, you need to know about a few mistakes that I did when I was starting out in this business.

1. Too many links at once
When you are starting out, besides hearing about the importance of title tags, you also hear about the importance of links. That’s when you start bookmarking, submitting articles, commenting on blogs, everything at once. When commenting on blogs, maybe you also end up with a few sitewide links from blogs that have the recent comments plugin. Hundreds of links all at once. That should be good, right? WRONG!

This is one of the worst things you can with a new site, be it in a non competitive niche. Google will filter your site out of the search results, no questions asked. I’ve had one site in a competitive niche filtered out for more than a year because of this. Usually, the more competitive the niche is, the longer your site will get filtered out. This is also the reason why I don’t believe in this experiment. You may get away with it if the site is old and established, but if you are not very sure about its authority, it is a gamble.

The authority of the site is very important in determining whether your site will get filtered out or not when getting many links. The more authority a site has, the more it can get away with. I will invoke the boring snowball example here, but which exemplifies this idea the best. The bigger a snowball is, the more snow it can attract when going down a slope.

Solution for this problem: When the site is new, start by getting a few (I said a few, not tens or hundreds) good anchored backlinks in the first month. From my experience, usually months 2 and 3 in the life of a website are the most critical and that’s when your website is most vulnerable to being filtered out.

2. Same anchor text
Anchor text is extremely important, and it is one of the essential factors that will get you rankings. So, it is only logical that you should only anchor your links with the targeted keyword, right? Again, WRONG!

This is another thing that will get your site filtered out. A good way to see this is with the help of the “allinanchor” operator. Use this in Google. Allinanchor:keyword. Do you see your site in the top 10 or 20? If yes, that’s where your site should rank for your keyword. If it doesn’t, it may have been filtered out either because of reason 1 or because of too much of the same anchor text.

Solution: Obviously, get links that have other anchors besides “blue widgets”. You need to also have unrelated anchors in your link profile. Keep it as natural as possible.

So can you now see the similarity between playing the guitar and link building? They both require tuning and playing all the right notes. Make sure that you always “listen” to what your website is telling you. If it is out of tune, you need to tune it up. If it is humming a beautiful song, you are on the right path.

Links, links, links… and oh, did I mention links? That’s what you need in order to make money online, unless you want to be an email list marketer having an incestuous business relationship with just about every other list marketer.

I will be honest with you here: I am completely fed up with junk products that continue to come out designed by people who have no interest in providing something of quality. I am even tired of myself sounding like a broken record when talking about the gurus and telling you that they never want you to succeed.

That’s why I am taking a break from guru slamming today, and I will present you a breath of fresh air in the Internet Marketing environment. It’s called Connect Content, and it is a membership program designed by Richard Timothy a.k.a. “RT” Cunningham.

Tell me more, tell me more!

Ok, Ok… Connect Content gives you the opportunity to build one way links (most of which are in content, the best type of links you can get). It works like this: you give anchored backlinks to other people from the network, and other people do the same for you. Each member has a status, which is either positive or negative. In order for you to be able to receive backlinks, your status must be positive. This basically means that you need to give as many links as you receive (or rather the summed value of the links you give must be equal or higher than the summed value of the links you receive). Each link that you give or receive is given a value based on the Page Rank of the respective link.

The developer, RT, is one of the “good guys” (join us… we have cookies – we’re not stuffing them though). In his own words (if I remember correctly), he is “watching the network like a hawk”. I don’t want to get into too many details here, as me and the other members want to keep this network clean and filled with people who share our beliefs and know what they are doing. And oh, did I mention the price? It’s only $12/month. An absolute bargain.

And here’s the dreaded affiliate link that takes you directly to the Connect Content site. If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, skip directly to the red line below.

Join Connect Connect now… or suffer the consequences!

The red line below

Ok, you don’t want to purchase through my affiliate link? I’ll tell you what. If you do, I will send you a free report called… Nah, nevermind. It’s your own business. If you don’t want to join, that’s your loss.

I have not started this site believing I could make great amounts of money with it. When I started it a few months back, I was way beyond the “make money with your Internet Marketing site” phase. This is a niche that’s way too crowded. I don’t really try very hard to promote it either. I rank decently for a few terms, but that’s about it. If rankings for important key phrases are going to come, good. If not, that’s good also.

I hear you saying “Get to the chase already”. Ok, here we go: it’s obvious that I am not a known expert and getting acknowledgment in the Internet Marketing circles is way down below in my list of priorities. However, when I make a post about a specific technique that I’m using, I see copycats appearing like mushrooms after the rain.

I don’t mean that they copy the style. They copy the exact keywords! After I explained about how to make niche sites that pay their own rent and I gave the site about the Hoover u5140 as an example, a bunch of other sites about that exact model appeared instantly. The same thing happened to the Spinmaster Air Hogs car and Cranium Hullabaloo.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining about the competition, I don’t really care that sites that compete against me appeared all of the sudden. The problem is that people do not like to think for themselves and this is one of the main reasons why people do not make money online. If you don’t develop creative thinking, if you don’t learn how to discover good niches yourself and if you don’t constantly refine your strategies and techniques, you will never make money online.

This is probably one of the main reasons why scammers and Internet Marketing gurus (a term which I detest by the way) thrive in the online environment. People don’t really like to think for themselves, they want others to do it for them. If you adhere to this mentality, you will surely be just another victim of the gurus and what’s even worse, making money online will always be just a dream for you.

By the way, the commissions generated by that Hoover site amount to a total of $27.71 up until today but the site will continue to produce sales for many months to come. I know it’s not much, but it was only 30 minutes of work and the main reason behind creating this website is to support bigger projects. You can create hundreds of these mini sites, as there are tons of products you can promote at Amazon.

I’ve only stumbled upon a handful of sites owned by people who really know how to do this. Now I know I may be spoiling Grizz with lots of link love, but his make money online site is hands down the best when it comes to Adsense tips. I personally take into consideration 4 important aspects, which, after a combined analysis of all of them, give me a profitable niche. Each of them is equally important, so don’t make the mistake of choosing a niche basing your choice on only one of these factors. So, in no particular order:

1. Average CPC of the keyword/niche
When you enter your desired keyword in the Google keyword tool, it will show you the estimated average cost per click. For example, in the case of “blue bike” (I’m out of widgets), the average CPC is $0.81. Now, this is what advertisers are paying in order to be placed on one of the 3 spots in Google search.

Now, what you need to understand is the fact that you will never actually receive $0.81 for a click on this keyword. Depending on the actual spot inside the block that the visitor clicks and the position of the block on your page, you will probably be able to get somewhere in between 2 cents to 35 cents per click. So what determines how much you get?

Ok… First thing: what ad block has been clicked? If you have 3 ad blocks on a page and the visitor clicks an ad from the last block, you will get much lower clicks than if the visitor clicks the first ad block on your page. This is why it is important that you place your most clicked ad block to be the first on the page. Which ad block is the first on the page is determined by the order in which they appear in the source code of your website. You can use CSS in order to place these blocks exactly as you want.

Then, the second thing: which listing from the ad block has been clicked? Was it the first one or the fourth one? This can make a big difference. While you can’t control this particular aspect, you can certainly control the first one. And this ends the explanation of why certain clicks are worth more and certain clicks are worth less. In the particular example of “blue bike”, I would expect the overall average click on the site to be somewhere around 20 cents / click.

2. Traffic of the keyword / niche
If you are quick to dismiss a keyword just after seeing a low CPC like 20 or 30 cents, you still have a lot to learn, because as I said, there are 4 factors that make up a profitable Adsense niche. So, now you need to analyze the traffic of the keyword or niche.

In the case of “blue bike”, the average monthly volume in the broad match type is 33,100. However, it would be wise to take the phrase or the exact match into consideration. I personally take the phrase match into consideration. What’s the difference between them?

Broad match means that the keywords that were searched for and incorporated into the count had the keyword in them, in any order. For example: “should I buy a bike that is blue” will be incorporated into the “blue bike” broad volume.

Phrase match means that the keywords that were searched for had the exact phrase in them. The example from the broad match would not fit into the phrase match. However, “should I buy a blue bike” will be incorporated into the phrase match.

Finally, exact match, means exactly what it says. People who are searching for “blue bike” only, no other strings attached. I prefer phrase match because it shows me the potential of the niche better than the exact match, since there may be lots of keyword variations.

3. Competition of the keyword / niche
I analyze competition taking only one thing into account. The “allintitle” count. The allintitle operator will show you the number of pages that have the keyword you specify in their titles. This is a good way to establish how many pages are optimized precisely with that keyword in mind.

In our case, “allintitle:blue bike” returns 40,000 pages. That’s pretty competitive but doable, if all the other factors are favorable. Also, you must take into consideration all the long tails. While you may have a core keyword with lots of competing sites, maybe the long tails alone are worth it.

Allintitle for “blue bike parts” is 634. Anything under 1,000 should be easy to dominate; “allintitle:bayview cruiser bike blue” returns only 23 results, that should be a walk in the park. So if you have many of these easy to dominate long tail keywords that get decent traffic, that is a very good sign.

4. The “clickability” of the niche
This is a term that I just coined up. This is the final factor that I had to incorporate into my analysis the hard way. There are certain niches where people will simply not click. Anything that is related to computers, where people are usually computer savvy, is usually not a good Adsense niche.

So, would I choose the “blue bike” niche? Nope, I wouldn’t. Why choose this niche when you can always go for blue widgets? Now seriously, I wouldn’t bother with this, but you need to make your own combination of what is acceptable or not based on your own proficiency. Just make sure that you take all of these four factors into account together, not separately.

I don’t really know why they are somewhat in the “underground” when it comes to affiliate networks. So why do I like them so much? Simply put, they are everything I want a professional  affiliate network to be. Let’s start:

1. Efficient real time tracking
Clicks and commissions are tracked in real time, there’s no waiting until the next day in order to see your sales. And what’s even more important, this is a network that doesn’t shave affiliate commissions – meaning it will not steal your commissions. This is a very rare quality indeed.

2. Deep linking
I hate it when an affiliate network doesn’t give me the opportunity to link to any page I want from the merchant’s website. If I want my visitor to go to the page that sells blue bikes (I figured the widget example is way overdone), then I should be able to get him to that particular page. Not to the page that sells red bikes, and not to the homepage.
Well, Shareasale will let you link to whatever page you want from the merchant’s website. This will consequently help you increase your conversions.

3. Quality control
This network is not one that accepts just any merchant. They must go through a pretty rigorous examination before being accepted into Shareasale. So you will never get the feeling of a big fat scam when looking at the programs that got accepted into the network.

4. Professionalism
A while back, I talked about what happened to me on Pepperjam Network. Well, Shareasale is way out of PJ’s league. I’ve had something similar happen here also, but the professional folks over at Shareasale are probably aware of the fact that you can’t control your visitors once they are off your website. So they simply voided the transactions.

5. On time payments
Don’t you hate it when you don’t get your money when you’re supposed to? Well, you will never experience an unfortunate event like that with shareasale.com .

6. Many merchants to choose from
After you use Shareasale for a while, you will find it hard to get back to almost any other affiliate network out there. They have a total of 2544 programs, out of which 2402 are pay per sale, 227 are pay per lead, and 6 are pay per click. You will find almost any niche you might be looking for – yes I know that if you add them up they are more than 2544, but some of them are both pay per sale and pay per lead. They will also provide you with great statistics like total EPC, 7 day EPC and 30 day EPC. In fact, Shareasale is one of my favorite money makers, together with Amazon and Adsense.
If you want to be a Shareasale affiliate, click here - it will take you directly to the sign up form.

Well, I was going to write all that and give it at least 4 stars, and then I made the mistake of entering the software’s website… just for extra inspiration. And there it was: a typical Internet Marketing scam! Another one… one that really saddened me, as I always believed that Brad Callen, the creator of SEO Elite, was above the fold.

The product used to cost a one time fee of $167. When I entered the website, to my amazement, it said only $47. “A very good deal”, I said to myself. What had made Brad Callen lower the price so much? I don’t know why, but I started reading the fine print, and there it was:

“After the full 30 day trial is up, we’ll bill you the special member price of only $47/month. “

So it doesn’t actually cost $47, it’s $47/month! I bet that 95% of all the people wanting to buy Seo Elite are convinced they are paying a one time fee of $47. Just another scam in an ocean of scams! I am deeply disappointed by Brad Callen and this… well, this belongs in the Hall of Shame.

Unfortunately, No affiliate link required !

So how do I go about this? My favorite method that I am going to discuss next is to create a site that promotes an Amazon product. The decision of buying a new domain for it or making a Blogspot, Wordpress or Blogsome blog is based around the specifics of the product. More precisely: does the product have moderate traffic or better or does it have low traffic? If the product has moderate traffic or better, I go for a paid domain. Why? Because with such a product, chances are far greater that you will get your money back or more, with the extra advantage that you own a new domain name.

Example: the keyword “cranium hullabaloo” has an approximate average search volume in Google of 22,200. While I don’t take this number literally, it shows me that the respective keyword does get decent traffic. Another example: hoover u5140 has an approximate search volume of 40,500, with many great long tail keyword variations, such as “hoover u5140-900 widepath tempo”. Now for low traffic keywords that would be great on free hosted blogs, take “Spinmaster Air Hogs Car” as an example. The approximate search volume on Google for “air hogs car” is 1000.

Now would I bother creating a site for a keyword that gets low traffic? It’s easy: chances are that it will someday make sales, and I don’t mind the low volume (as a matter of fact it already made several sales already and I haven’t started link building on it…yet). You need to understand that you should spread your net as much as possible. While one of these websites will never make much money, think about this: would 100 or even 200 of those make money? Of course they would. Those sales tend to add up incredibly.

And now here’s the cherry on the cake: while making money themselves, these websites will increase your online real estate dramatically. There are countless things that you can do with them, but maybe the most appealing of them all is the fact that you can use them for your link building campaigns. These are the types of links that you normally strive for. The best strategy in this respect is to create groups of small niche websites that concentrate on the same theme. Then, build a large authority website that is linked to from all the websites in the same niche with it. Now how about that for a ton of authority?

Finally, how do I go about promoting these websites? I do it in the following steps:

1. I create the website and let it rest of a month or two. I only concentrate on getting a couple of backlinks to it for indexing and aging;
2. When a month or two have passed, I do an article submission run using “Article Post Robot”;
3. I find blog pages that have the product’s name in their title tags and comment on them;
4. I may do link exchanges between them also.

Using this quick link building strategy, you will definitely get to top 10 for the products’ names quite easily. The traffic you will get will be highly targeted and the conversion rates will be amazing. This is due to both the nature of the traffic and the trust of the Amazon brand. How much should creating such a website and promoting it take? No more than 2 hours for each mini site. Thanks for reading thus far and good luck if you decide to follow my advice.