Blogging | Affiliate Blog Online

Blogging Archives

How Much Did We Make on Amazon in November 2010?

Friday, December 3rd, 2010 at 11:41 pm

Comments (152)

Well it’s been a whole year since we first revealed how much we made on Amazon in November 2009 and such a lot has happened since then.

We’ve said many times before that we don’t want to put all our eggs in the one basket so we have been working on a variety of different passive income streams in order to diversify our income. We have been trying out a few things over the year which seem to be working and we are pretty satisfied with the outcome.

Its now time for us get back into promoting Amazon products, after all we know how well they convert. Even though we didn’t spend a lot of time this year working on our Amazon product sites, the work that we did do resulted in an increase in our income which is pretty nice considering the downturn in the US economy.

Now, before I go any further, I want to reiterate that if you are new to making money online or if you’ve been around for a while and aren’t making much money then you really shouldn’t be looking for other methods to diversify at this point. The only time you need to start diversifying is when you are making or getting close to making a full-time income from one single source. Prior to that you need to focus on one income source until you start making money. There is no point diversifying if you aren’t making money from at least one form of passive income.

This is the number one mistake made by people trying to make money online. They jump on to the next thing that comes along instead of focusing on getting their first income producing stream working. We know what it’s like – we did exactly the same thing.

So our main goal for our Amazon sites for this past year was to get a number of different pages from a variety of different sites making money.This has worked nicely as we are seeing income come in from a variety of sites now and not just a few.

What we did do was create a few brand new product reviews but mostly we went into our stats and selected pages on our sites that were getting traffic already but were not converting very well. We then set about reworking the reviews into the new longer format. Even to this day we still have a lot of poorly written reviews on our sites. Reviews that are not particularly helpful to the reader and are just a rehash of product information; this is how we used to write reviews until we realized some time back that they don’t convert very well at all.

In the past year, we only ever worked on 3 to 5 pages at a time. There might have been 2 from one site and another 2 from another site and another from a third site. We didn’t work on those sites as a whole – just on those individual product review pages from those sites.

So How Much Did We Make on Amazon in November 2010?

As you can see from the screen shot we made a total of $19,023.09 last month. So that’s about $4500 more than this time last year. Interestingly enough, our conversion rate has improved from last year. There could be a number of reasons for that but I’d like to think it is because we are writing better quality reviews and slowly reworking the poorly written ones on our site.

Another interesting thing to note is that the number of clicks is down a little from last year. Again there could be a number of reasons for this – perhaps the downturn in the economy in the US?? Hard to say since it is not a huge difference.

I wish I had taken a screen print on the 30 November because it would also have shown the commission rate we received which was 8.25%. I don’t think we have ever hit the 8.5% rate but it may be on the cards for December since we are already at the 7.5% commission rate and have earned $2384 for just the first two days of this month.

As you can well imagine, we are extremely happy with this. It’s been a long road for us to reach this point – we’ve worked hard and it has taken us a lot of years to finally get things working for us. So to see these sorts of figures really puts smiles on our faces.

You can see now why we have decided to get back and spend more time on our Amazon sites. That will be our major focus in 2011.

We hope you can use this as a bit of motivation to get you going for next year. You can do it – we know you can, because if we can do it you can too.

What to Do if You Have Multiple Sites but are Not Making Much Money

Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 9:32 pm

Comments (68)

One of the more common emails we receive is from people with multiple sites who aren’t making much money from them. Only this morning, we received another email from someone who has around 100 sites…he had come to the conclusion that the multiple site model just isn’t working for him. He’s one of the lucky ones since he actually realized this before moving on to building even more sites. Not many people stop to see if something is working for them or not and keep going until they are totally burned out and they have little to show for all their work.

It’s hard work maintaining 100 sites. I can’t even imagine the work involved – we have 20 sites and when we were working on them all at once it was tough going. We don’t ever want to go back to that again.

Now we’re not saying having multiple sites doesn’t work. I’m sure there are people out there with hundreds of sites that are making money but this model has a number of drawbacks mostly the amount of work that is needed to keep the sites updated and maintained. Plus, we have seen so many people using this multiple site model that are really struggling and adding more sites makes no real difference to their income….instead it just creates even more work.

So what do you do if you have multiple sites and aren’t making much money from them?

Step 1

The first step is to stop, right now, creating any new websites. There is no point creating anything new if you aren’t making money from the sites you already have. If you are doing something that isn’t working, why repeat the process? So make a conscious decision to not create any new websites.

Step 2

Take a break from your websites. Take two days or even a week if you can and don’t go anywhere near your websites. The reason we suggest this is that most people who are in the process of trying to make money online are usually in what I call ‘frantic mode’. They have one thing on their mind and that is to make money so they frantically build more sites and frantically add more content and frantically look for backlinks. They never take a break and are constantly going from one thing to the next in the hope that the next thing they spot will work for them.

Taking a break clears the head and gets you into the right frame of mind to start afresh. You want to be in ‘relaxed mode’ not ‘frantic mode’ and taking time out will get you there.

Step 3

The next few steps involve getting some stats together. Hopefully you will have Google Analytics installed on each of your sites as this will help with your analysis. If not, you can use the stats provided by your hosting company.

Go to Google Analytics and find the top 5 pages on your sites that are getting the most traffic. This doesn’t mean finding the top 5 pages from each individual site – it means the top 5 pages overall. Just make a list of these pages so you can easily refer to them as you go through your analysis – you can use Word, Notepad or Excel for this.

Step 4

Take the first page in your list and go back to Google Analytics and look at the keywords that people are using to get to that page. This is how we do that:

1. Click on Content from the left menu in Google Analytics.
2. Click Top Content.
3. Click the actual url from the results that appear on the right hand side of the screen.
4. On the page that appears, click Entrance Keywords under Landing Page Optimization section.

This will provide you with a list of keywords that people are typing into Google to get to your page.

Add these keywords to your list – you only need to add the first 10 keywords or so.

Step 5

Now head over to Google and see where you are ranking for each of those keywords. Add those rankings to your list.

Step 6

Open up the free Google Keyword Tool and type in each of your keywords to see how much traffic each gets – (we use the ‘Exact’ option and look at Local Monthly Searches). Add that to your list as well.

Step 7

Now we are ready to analyze the data we have put together to see whether that page is worth working on. At this point, your list might look something like this for your first page (note that I made up the figures, so don’t waste your time going to Google to test these figures):

Page: mywebsite.com/classicdiamondring.com
Keywords Currently Ranked For	Current Ranking in Google	Potential Google Traffic per Month
diamond ring	6	6200
classic diamond ring	12	3200
best diamond ring	4	1800
diamond ring review	8	1500
etc

Now open up the actual page and take a look at the content on that page. Ask yourself the following questions:

Does the content on the page match the keywords I am ranking for? In other words, if people are typing in ‘diamond ring’, ‘classic diamond ring’, ‘best diamond ring’ and so on to get to your page and your page is about ‘emerald diamond rings’ then something is wrong. All you are going to get is people clicking the back button to find another site with diamond rings. If this is the case then simply change the content on your page to match the keywords people are using to get to your site.
Is the content on the page helpful? – I can almost guarantee that if your page has less than 300 words on it, then it is not very helpful. You might think that creating a short snappy review will get people to click through to the merchant but I can tell you from experience we haven’t found this to be the case. Make your reviews long and helpful….around 1000 words.
Are there a lot of distractions on the page? – If you are promoting a particular product on that page then that’s all you should do. Don’t go adding Google Adsense and other pop-ups and widgets and flashing ads.
Is the product worth promoting? – We’ve said this many times and we will probably say it many more times…there is no point promoting a product that isn’t worth promoting. Don’t just pick a product because you will get a healthy commission for it – choose products that people love. In other words, look at the reviews for the product and see what people are saying. If you choose a quality product to begin with then you will be streets ahead of those who randomly select products to write about.
Will I get enough traffic to this page? – Since we asked you to find your top 5 pages, you are already getting traffic to this page but you will also want to see if you have the potential to get even more traffic. So check your list and see how many people are searching for those keywords. If I were already getting traffic for the keyword ’diamond ring’ I would be working hard to get that page to the number 1 spot.
Can I improve my ranking for those keywords? – The answer to this is always ‘yes’. Unless you are in the number 1 spot already, there is always the potential to increase your ranking and get even more traffic. This might involve checking out the competition to see how difficult it might be but in general for product type keywords, it is often quite easy to move up in the rankings by getting good quality backlinks.
Will I get a decent commission? – We tend to avoid products that are under $150 – at least for Amazon products. If you are going to promote a product that is worth $20 and your commission is 8% you are going to have to sell a lot of them to make any decent money. If you are going with Amazon products try and stick with products over $150, or at the very least $100. If you using Clickbank products then you can obviously go with products that are cheaper since the commission rate is often much higher.

Do you see what we are doing here? We are focusing right in on just one single solitary page. Those with multiple sites very rarely have the time to do this. They create a short page of content that is often copied or is poorly written and then move on to the next page. That first page never gets the attention it deserves and never will. It’s simply forgotten and lost in the multitude of pages that get added to their sites.

You need to be doing the above steps for each of your top 5 pages to find those that are worth working on. If only two of those pages are worth working on based on your analysis then add them to a separate list. Now go back to Google Analytics and find the next 5 pages and go through the same process again.

What you want to end up with is five pages that you can focus your attention on for the next three months. They are pages that have the potential to get enough traffic, have products worth promoting, have products where you will get a decent commission and so on.

So your next three months might include the following tasks:

1. Reworking each of the five pages until the reviews are around 1000 words and are helpful to the reader. Think about what you would like to see in a review if you were about to buy a particular product.

2. Backlinking, backlinking, backlinking – spend the next 3 months getting as many GOOD QUALITY backlinks to those five pages as you possibly can.

That’s all you need to do.

How to Increase Subscribers to Your Email List

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 2:05 am

Comments (19)

In the past, one of the things we were a bit slow to take on was building up an email list. And even when we did, we were even slower to send out anything to that list. Not good really considering that we were consistently told by those in the business that your top priority should be list building. But over time we finally caught on and realized the true potential in having a list of people who are really interested in what you have to say.

Let’s put it this way, if you have a list of 5000 people and you send out just one promotion to that list that will give you $50 commission per sale and only 100 people on that list buy it, you will make $5000….nice! And you don’t need to spam your list to do it. You can give your subscribers really good quality information and still make some money along the way, especially if you promote things that you have actually used and recommend.

However, the main problem is getting people to sign up to your list in the first place. So how do you do it without harassing them? I know that I’m not a fan of pop-ups. If I go to a blog with a pop-up I will just close the pop-up and get on to reading their website. However, lots of people have great success with pop-ups and say that it can increase the sign-up rate dramatically. So we actually purchased a couple of WordPress plugins that do just that. Unfortunately neither of them worked with this theme correctly – apparantly it is something to do with the font settings or such but probably just as well because as I’ve already mentioned, we aren’t fans of pop-ups.

So what we were looking for was a way to increase our sign-up rate without using pop-ups if possible. And this is how we came upon the Maxblog Subscribers Magnet Plugin. We wanted a way of getting our sign up form in front of our readers faces without being overly intrusive and from what I can tell so far, this plugin is going to do the job. (Bear in mind this plugin does allow pop-ups – we’ve just chosen not to use them.)

I purchased the plugin today as it is currently on sale at 30%off and have uploaded it to this blog. I am a bit of a fan of the Maxblog team – they make some awesome plugins with my favorite being the Maxblog Ninja Affiliate plugin. So I had no doubt, even before buying it that this one would be any different. And once again the Maxblog team have not let me down as this plugin is pretty amazing and I am really excited about it which is why I am writing this blog post to let you know all know about it.

Now I have no idea at this stage if this plugin will increase the sign up rate to this blog as I have only just installed it but I am pretty confident that it will. It’s obvious that the more opportunities you provide to your readers to sign up, the more sign-ups you will get. I will update this post over the next few days as it is too early to tell yet…most of our readers are already in bed by now so we won’t see much action until the morning.

In the meantime I can let you know just how powerful this plugin actually is by taking you through some of the features.

1. First of all, the Subscribers Magnet plugin allows you to add your sign up form just about anywhere on your blog including:

Within the post – If you notice at the bottom of this post you will see a sign up form in place. This is now displayed at the bottom of every blog post on our blog. You can also display it at the top if you prefer and it can be aligned left, right or centred.
In the footer – This one I am not really fussed on so I haven’t activated it but I know that others have had success with this style of sign-up form. It basically adds one of those footer strip pop-ups that appear at the very bottom of your blog.
In the sidebar – this is one of the most obvious places to put a sign up form. This works via the widgets section of your blog and it’s super easy to customize.
As a checkbox next to the comment form – you can see this one in action at the bottom of this blog post when you leave a comment. There is a little checkbox just above the text box that when checked signs your reader up to your newsletter.
After the reader has left a comment – this one you can also see in action on this blog but only if you leave a comment. What will happen is that you once you submit your comment you will see your comment awaiting moderation and in that comment field you will see a sign-up box. Pretty neat…I like this one.
As a pop-up – as we’ve mentioned, this is not one we choose to have on our blog. Maybe one day we will test it but for the moment we are going to stick with no pop-ups. This plugin allows the pop-in to be delayed on opening to whatever amount of time you want giving the reader the chance to read the content on your blog before the pop-up appears.

2. This plugin works with all the major autoresponders including aWeber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart etc.

3. It will automatically auto-fill your readers name and email address in the sign-up form fields if they have previously left a comment in the past. So in other words, if they don’t sign up the first time, the next time they visit your blog their name and email will be auto-filled into the Name and Email fields of your sign-up form. This will make them more likely to subscribe as they won’t have to enter any details and will only have to hit that subscribe button.

4. Silent Subscription – Basically it allows you to automatically sign-up any visitor that has left a comment on your blog. So they will automatically be added to your email list although if you have a double opt-in list they will still need to confirm. Not one I would use personally, I believe visitors should have the option to subscribe or not.

5. Automatic Email – This is a slight variation to the one above and is the one I prefer. You can send out an email automatically when a reader leaves a comment on your blog for the first time. In that email you can put whatever you like – just a thank you is nice or you can promote a product, or you can suggest that they sign up to your email list.

6. Ability to remove the “Powered by Subscribers Magnet” text from the bottom of the sign-up form. I thought I would add this one here as a lot of people would probably not want that wording on their sign-up form. If, however, you decide to leave it, you can add your affliate link to it and make money from any sales that are referred to Maxblog.

7. This plugin also provides the ability to make your opt-in forms as fancy as you like. There are plenty of options including different font sizes, colors, width, height etc and the ability to add an image. There is also an html option so I can only assume that if you have an opt-in form already available in html that you can just transfer it over to the html form in this plugin and load it up.

Overall this is a fantastic little plugin and well worth the money in our opinion. If you are interested in it check out the video on their sales page – if that doesn’t convince you then nothing will.

And don’t forget that the sale for Maxblog Subscribers Magnet plugin is only on for four days so don’t think about it for too long as a 30% saving is a great offer.

UPDATE: We’ve had the plugin in place for a few days now and have noticed around a 30% increase in subscribers. However, we often get periods like this anyway where suddenly our subscriber sign-ups will increase although I have to admit so far it has been consistent for the past three days. I will provide another update in a week or so to see if it continues.

Why You Shouldn’t Give Up

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 1:14 am

Comments (31)

We know from the emails we receive that so many people are struggling to make a decent living online. It can be quite depressing at times when you seem to put in so much effort for little return, and often your family and friends are not supportive.

But Affiliate Marketing does work, you just need to get the process right. We tried all sorts of things before we finally found what worked for us and the steps that we talk about in our Amazonian Profit Plan certainly made the world of difference to our income and lifestyle. The main thing is to find what suits you and stick to it. Money isn’t going to start coming in at the start, be prepared for this, in fact it generally takes a few months before you start to see any real results. But if you stick at it you will get there.

So why do I love the affiliate marketing business? Well it allows me to live a rich and fulfilling life full of extraordinary moments. I just want to share some of the highlights with you, maybe it will help to keep you focused when you know that I am not some young tech savvy person, in fact I am a grandmother and a great grandmother (I started young) so if I can do this, so can you.

In the last three weeks alone, we have had the opportunity to drive 4 different model Ferraris through a company called Prancing Horse, attend the T. Harv Eker ‘Millionaire Mind” conference and then went on to the Tony Robins/Richard Branson Ultimate Success Summit in Sydney.

It has been a lifelong dream of mine to own a Ferrari, so having the opportunity to drive 4 different models was an amazing experience.

We left Sydney on the Friday morning and drove to Kiama for lunch at the Seabreeze Restaurant and then further on down the NSW coast to Gerringong where we stayed overnight at the Bellachara Boutique Hotel. The package included, accommodation, all meals and a fantastic massage when we arrived at the hotel.

Then we drove back to Sydney the next day. There were 8 people all told, and each car had two people in each, so we stopped to do a driver exchange and later on at the next stop we exchanged cars. This gave everyone the opportunity to drive each of the cars. A totally awesome weekend. And just don’t tell anyone I told you but Paula got a speeding ticket driving one of the Ferraris – a whopping $672 (approx $630US) for doing 40kms over the speed limit! She says it was worth it!

A week later we were back in Sydney to attend the 3 day Millionaire Mind Intensive event and stayed on in Sydney to see Tony Robbins and Richard Branson, for a taste of more motivational inspiration.

So for the past 3 weeks we have stayed in Sydney at 4 & 5 star hotels, eaten at very nice restaurants and attended educational and inspirational events; things we could not have done without our online business and more specifically when we finally worked out what we needed to do to get our websites to start returning serious money.

It has allowed us to travel wherever and whenever we like because this business can be done on your laptop. We flit back and forward to the US and next year we are off to Europe again, plus we get to travel around Australia at will.

We didn’t always know what we were doing and we made every mistake in the book along the way. But we found the key to success is to have a plan, focus on it and open your mind to the endless possibilities that are available.

We did it and so can you!!