Make Affiliate Money

Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts over the past few weeks. Things have been pretty mad in my offline world. The company I work for announced a redundancy program in late March and my job was at risk. Luckily I was not chosen to be made redundant this time, but two of my close colleagues were made redundant last week.

This wake up call has really made me think about what I am doing, the kind of commitments I have, both financially and emotionally. When you are faced with the possibility of losing a very good steady income you begin to think about what you are spending and what you could do without. It also made me think about the income I make online and how crucial it might be if the worst did happen. It also gave me comfort to know that I would have a way of making money, and in theory could make much more online if I had the time.

In a perverse way I was actually kind of excited about being thrown out of my comfort zone and being forced to make a go of it on my own, both with online efforts and other consultancy options (there are simply no jobs right now). I even bought a great domain name for a company and investigated the possibility of creating a limited company and checked out the cost of things like Professional Indemnity Insurance. Unless forced to or without the guarantee of income, most of us will not leap into the unknown and leave our comfort zones, the commitments we have are so great.

So back to Affiliate Marketing!

In the last three weeks I have switched CB accounts again. The last account had a period of no sales for 5 days and I created a new account, surprise surprise, instant sales! This new account has now made me $1000 in the past 17 days averaging 1 sale per day and $55 per sale.

Today I banked a check for $722 from the previous account so this account switching is definately working for me. As I have said before, I cannot be sure that those sales would not have come if I had kept the hops to the old account, but I am not willing to take the risk.

There has also been a Google update since the last post and that has again brought mixed fortunes, some sites have increased PR such as this blog and some dropped, most have increased in traffic and SERPs which is what is important, would rather be No1 for my chosen keywords than PR5! Both would be nice!

I have also been doing a bit of domaining. I bought a site in December for $25 and sold in March for $35. Now that is not a great profit, but it was due a renewal so would have started to cost me money. I also did nothing with it between buying and selling and it made me no money. It was a product name domain and that product is being offloaded by the owner so I thought it best to get rid. At the end of the day, if you can make 40% profit for doing nothing then lets do it more and more!

I am going to sell off a few other sites which are doing nothing and will start to cost me in renewals, this should raise a few $$ for PPC or to buy other sites.

Finally, I have bought fxter.com which will eventually be a Forex Blog for all things Forex, not just Forex Robots which is what most of my sites are based around. I hope to use this blog to create an opt-in list and be able to jump on big product launches etc much quicker and easier than I do currently. Also we the number of forex related sites, backlinks to this blog should be good for SERPs and traffic.

Hopefully it won’t be as long before my next post.

James

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Not sure if this is a well known technique or not for searching for good available domain names, but I have just started using Google’s Adwords Tool in conjunction with godaddy’s bulk domain tool.

If you are looking for a keyword rich domain in a particular niche you can simply search for the keywords on the Adwords Tool, this will give you lots of variations and tell you how many times they were searched for. You can download the list of results into a .txt file.

You then copy the list of keywords from the .txt file and paste into the godaddy bulk domain tool. Don’t worry about spaces as godaddy bunches up the words.

You can select which TLD (top level domain) you want to search for i.e. .com .net .org or .co.uk etc (you can select more than one but I would search for .com, then .net then .org etc but it depends what you want the domain for.)

Godaddy will then tell you which keyword domains are available. I was surprised how many keyword rich domains were still available in quite a competitive niche. One .com was available that had over 50,000 monthly searches.

I have found that sites with good keywords domains, particularly .com domains naturally rank well and with a bit of good SEO and backlinks can get very high in the Search Engine Results.

If anyone has any questions about this, please drop me a comment.

James

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A quick note tonight as I am still really tired after the long weekend and Weddings!

I had to make a few changes to a couple of my websites tonight as I had noticed some had been dropped by Google completely, I don’t mean just slipped a few pages, I mean not indexed.

One of them is The Forex Brotherhood which was riding high for “forex brotherhood” terms. It was a holding page and list builder during the pre-launch period and the end of August. Then I decided to redirect it with a hoplink to the Forexbrotherhood.com site, so when someone clicks on theforexbrotherhood.com it goes to the official site. I did this using a php redirect script on the index page.

This worked fine for a while and the site still ranked well for my keywords for several weeks giving me lots of hops and a few sales.

Then suddenly Google updated and the robots then found nothing, no meta tags, no content, no keywords etc etc. All of the links I have built obviously still remain, but they mean nothing if google finds nothing on the site. DOH!

I have reverted to a landing page with some keyword rich content and a list builder. Lets hope Google finds it again quickly and I can get back to where I want to be on the SERPS.

So my tip is, do not use php redirect on the index page if you want it to rank in Google, if you just want to use it as a direct link for ezine or adwords etc then fine, but I want search engine traffic too.

This might not be news to a lot of experienced marketers, but if one of you learns something then I am happy enough.

JZ

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