Day 16 – Niche Sites Update
The biggest problem with long weekends and public holidays is that they seem to be taken as an opportunity to “do some DIY”. Those little five minute jobs that expand to fill the entire universe and soak up all the spare time.
Well, we’re just coming out of that hell here in the UK, so I’ve not been working on my sites as much as I’d hoped as you can guess. I did manage to get a new Amazon site set up yesterday and to sort out the hosting and base setup for a second, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
Bizarrely, one of my old sites has suddenly hopped back up onto the first page of Google after a long absence, no link building, no new content and here it is again. Sometimes I just don’t understand Google. It’s like they knew I’d said on here that I was going to do some updates to these sites and decided to reward me in advance – I wish!!
Real work begins again tomorrow. I have a lot more sites to get up and some links to build.
Earnings for Day 14 and 15 are all Adsense. $0.60
Day 16 – Free Keyword of the Week
Your freebie keyword this week may take a wee bit more investment to make it work as a couple of the TLD’s have already gone. Having said that, the .com is available…..only it’s up on godaddy for $1600. Ouch! So let’s look at the keyword.
Womens Leather Shoes
It doesn’t quite get the searches of the phrase with an apostrophe “Women’s Leather Shoes” but it’s pretty good – certainly worth looking at closer.
The local US searches for the top keyword come to 90,500…..3,000 a day! So maybe the .com is worth buying after all. Traffic Travis has this down as a relatively easy keyword, there are a load of PR 0′s in the top 10 and get this – the top slot is held by the .net exact match domain with a PR of 0, and age of 0 and only 16 backlinks…and not only that, it’s a super-thin X-factor adwords site! The .org is at number 11 with zeros for everything including backlinks.
Let’s do some sums on that. 3,000 searches a day giving roughly 1200 clicks to site number 1 (40%) and then maybe 10% CTR on an X-factor adsense setup. That gives us 120 * $1 roughly (after checking the CPC) – that’s a pretty nice house payment for doing nothing!!!
Now, I’m not going to suggest you jump on the .com straight away, but the .co and the .co.uk are still there, so kick it off with them, make 15 days worth of cash and then buy the .com and RULE.
I put some ideas out last week and no-one jumped on them, I may start doing some of this myself if no-one takes me up on them.
Day 14 – New domains
There used to be a fairly famous saying in photographic circles that dealt with the whole idea of grabbing opportunity as it comes along. “F8 and be there” talked about setting your camera to some fairly mid-range settings, with a big depth-of-field so you could grab anything from closeup to “infinity” and then just taking the shot.
There are two key elements to this. The first is technical – making sure that the camera could (possibly) grab an image in a wide variety of light that you might be able to tweak at a later date. Remember that there was no autofocus and autoexposure back then….it had to be middle of the road to even have a chance of catching anything at all.
The second crucial item is “be there”. With the best will in the world, you won’t get the shot if you are nowhere near when that split-second of image occurs.
Here’s a second saying that I’ve often heard in corporate sales. “Isn’t it amazing that the salesmen who land the lucky deals are also the ones that have done the most work in that area already”. Again, it’s all about being prepared and being in the right place.
How does all this relate to internet marketing? Well, I guess the preparation is fairly easy. No matter how much we’re all told that you don’t need to be technical in this business, we still have to know how to join the dots to make a sales funnel actually work. There is an element of preparation involved in making this stuff into a business. So, just at a raw level, I’d encourage you to learn as much as you can about how things work, even while you are outsourcing it to others to get it done. At the very least you may spot the rogues in the outsource world before you get ripped off.
As far as the second part goes, it’s all about being out there. That’s market presence after all. If no-one can find your stuff (or isn’t even looking for it) then you can have the shiniest web-site in the world and still make no money. If you have a bunch of kick-ass concepts but still haven’t bought a domain, how will it ever take off?
Here’s my trivial advice and it’s trivial because it is so easy and yet so difficult to do. Buy your first domain!
This simple step held me up for several weeks when I started…it’s like some kind of giant leap or something, but it really isn’t. A .com will cost you around $10 for a whole year.
Secondly, get some hosting. Get it cheap if you have to but this is part of “being there” – it’s you on the internet. Pay $5-10 a month and you’ll end up with a host that can handle multiple sites all with their own domains. So, the initial outlay may feel painful, but you get to reuse the host for every other domain you buy (and when you make some money, you can think about how to change that account for something with more features).
What about me? Well it seems that I’ve turned into a serial “preparer” – this is also not a good thing, I need to finish some of these things!! Yesterday was a day of misery helping set up sheds and things, so no real progress was made on my sites, but I treated myself in the evening to a little keyword research.
This seems to be the bit of IM that I really like. Maybe I should offer you all a service, I’ll look ‘em up, you build ‘em. Anyone interested?
Anyway, I digress. I spent a bit of time digging in some electronics areas and have bought myself a load of sites that are product related but Google says are still trending upwards. Think of technology like camera resolution. Folk searching for 2 megapixel cameras are starting to drop away but people buying 12 megapixel cameras are on the increase. If you can get a couple of good domains in future (but close) technology, you should be able to get set up in advance of the big wave. As a result I’m going to building out these sites in the next week and getting them up in Google before my competitors even care about the stuff!
My mini net of related sites are all doing ok, most are sat at around 18 in Google for both broad and phrase searches (if anything, they’re doing better in broad than phrase searches – huh?) I’m going to try to set up a run of UAW today, but weekend family commitments are looming large at the moment.
Earnings for the last 2 days: $0
MobiBlueprint update.
One thing I forgot to say in my update was that I went and got myself a copy of MobiBlueprint yesterday.
My corporate life got me started on some of the technical aspects of the “mobile revolution” and this course looks like a great way to learn about marketing on the new medium. Everyone recommended Gauher Chaudry for his honesty and delivery so I was already on my way to buying….and then, out of the blue I got a mail from Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton about their bonus for this offering.
I like these 2 guys enormously and I already own their Niche Blueprint 2.0 product, so I signed up through their link…a review of MobiBlueprint to follow.
Day 13 – Amazon UK or Amazon US?
I seem to have got caught in a 2 day cycle of updates and I don’t really know why this is, but I’m going with the flow at the moment. Maybe I’ll get back up to one a day when I have more results to post about.
I was looking at my adsense earnings for 2 days ago and noticed that although I did get a clickthrough on that day, Amazon decided to pay me precisely zero for it, so I’m guessing that they think that was a dodgy click in some way. Have you seen this happen in your own accounts, I’d be interested to know?
Yesterday was a good day in terms of getting things done. I spent some time researching my other two satellite site subjects and wrote them an article each, more needed, but it’s a good start. The Amazon plugin (WPZonBuilder) is up and running on the sites, so I have the raw information for all the products in place. I’m going to experiment with changing the templates around – maybe to allow me a space to put my own review in. Eventually I hope to have them all personalised, but for now the data is flowing so that’s good.
The title for the post is all about the dilemma of being an Amazon affiliate based in the UK (as I am). We have a load of things in the terms and conditions over here that make Amazon UK a distinctly unappealing place to be an affiliate, unless you get a lot of extra items bought off the back of an item you’ve sent a customer to.
The biggest problem is that they cap every single item payment at £7 (roughly $11) and it doesn’t matter what tier you are on, that cap stays in place. So, say I sell a $4000 TV. At 4% for electronics that would be £160 in most programs and that might be worth having if you could do enough of them, but Amazon UK will give you £7 for all your work!
Now, at anything over about £300 it’s obviously a clear-cut victory for selling on Amazon US (provided there are about the same number of buyers from each region), but in the £175-£300 area it’s not so obvious. It is still true that we have a roughly one-to-one exchange rate where many goods are concerned and so a £200 item in the UK may well be only $200 on Amazon US. It’s not always true, but it happens enough that it raises the following question.
Since a pound is roughly 1.5 dollars a the moment, is it better to get capped at £7 for a £200 pound item rather than to get a full $8 for the equivalent $200 item on Amazon US – of course the answer is yes – for a very thin band of price ranges. This doesn’t even start to take into account the application of higher tiered payouts where it all gets even worse.
My feeling is that unless the thing is selling exclusively in the UK, then it is almost always better to head to Amazon US. Even on smaller priced items where selling more will tend to push your higher-priced goods ever closer to that nasty cap if you were in the UK.
Do you have a strong opinion on this, I’d be interested to hear what you have to say below.