Forum Moderators: skibum
OTOH, my second site (type B) which has been up about 3 months just sort of (comparatively) exploded lately and I've been getting about $5-$10/day through adsense and referal purchases. My third and fourth sites are still in the $0.50-$1 a day though.
So here in my head I am thinking - didn't take me that long to build this site, and now that I have a 'template' I can find another product line and build one just like it, and another, and another. Maybe at a rate of 1 site per 3-4 days.
Which of course, makes me think:
- 1 site - $5/day -> 100 sites - $500/day
That's $15,000/month!... dare I say, HOLY GUACAMOLE?
and then, why stop at 100?
Now, between my paltry start and my big dreams - what's wrong with this picture? how realistic is this? I mean, there's gotta be a caveat somewhere, right? it can't be _that_ easy to make this much money...?
Sometimes, however, if the sites all rely on each other for links or if they have duplicate content you can lose a lot of them at once to Google's QA moves. Also, if they all rank with the same 'method', one new filter can wipe you out.
Depends what type of site they are, of course. You will likely suffer setbacks before reaching 100 sites, but keep at it.
Ah, I think you edited the last sentence in? :)
That's what I am looking for - the setbacks. I'd like ot know of major common ones, if there is such a thing?
You mentioned a couple - duplicate content and if they all are optimized in similar ways. Makes sense.
Anyone else, any others?
I mean, I build a site, let it be indexed, tweak a bit the keywords. It either gets ranked well enough or not. I don't mean to compete with the big boys and fight for top 10 spots in the serps. Even 2nd or 3rd page results will generate traffic and revenue.
Assuming that one knows something about ranking in the first place that they can get a couple sites up to generate revenue, then ..seems like a slam dunk to me.
Amazing!
don't interlink too much, and make sure the sites vary. a few sites being "similar" is okay- all of them being "similar" definitely isn't.
keep on making different sites, sites that someone would see and wouldn't know they're related to your previous sites. as you keep on doing this, each site will continue to make more (as you learn more) as well.
don't develop some sort of cookie cutter copy and paste site you use for everything.
it can't be _that_ easy to make this much money...?
This is what I found:
The first good site is easy to find and make.
The second site is twice as hard and makes less money.
The third site takes four times of work (hard to find) and makes much less ...
Your results reflex my experience: First gives $20/day, second $10/day and third ~$1.0/day.
interesting point. I'll keep it in mind and see if I can break out of your (and mine) results up to now. Do you have any insights on working through it?
I choose not to interlink my sites too much. Try to get them to all stand on their own.
I don't see many setbacks. Sort of how I started out. Now I add to the sites I already have. It's just easier for me to control doing it by myself. It's sort of become a mall site only you don't know that unless you go to the site maps.
wellzy
If you do PPC, then the issue is money upfront.
If you do JV, viral marketing, then time is the issue.
Try some trials with stuff you think might work by a small PPC direct to merchant trial - 3 days, 100 clicks or a $100 spent is my own trial limit, but please adjust to suit your own position.
For every winner, you'll probably have 5 losers, but by being ruthless with your trials and not flogging any dead horses, at the end of a few months you may have found 5 new things that work. At this point, build 5 sites to SEO if u must, or just leave the progfitable PPC's running. I do both, but then I'm greedy and I don't like financial dependence on an ever changing algo.
Outsourcing and having staff is also just adding complications in my opinion - keep it simple, easy to manage and have minimal staff/customer service requirements. That way you can join the golden bathrobe club sooner rather than later.
In aff marketing, less is more. Less work, more money is the goal and 100 sites is neither, it's just a huge risk if it doesn't work out.
Just my 5 cents :)
I gather you have less sites but that earn you more hence your comment about 100 sites being too much work?
Most of my stuff is from PPC direct to merchant, but I also do amateur SEO, help others learn, etc. And yes, I have nothing like 100 sites, in fact it's probably less than 10 now I think of it.
as i've been learning and building sites off and on over the past while i've started to figure out a couple of things but a lot of this seems like a big mystery to me still..
After years of small hobby sites that seemed to build up and die off I finally built 2 solid sites that are quickly starting to turn into potentialy decent sites.. one I started as a pure hobby interest that was positioned with a nice domain name has already started making 1-5$/day after 2-3 weeks..
as for the question.. i see this discussion of products and affiliate marketing programs.. are people mostly targeting specific products through affiliates or entire programs? I know that noone wants to give away too many of their secrets.. but is it possible someone could tell me a past site idea or mechanism that worked and had success but is not so valuable or useful anymore?
I'm building entire sites around datafeeds from merchants, but also adding additional merchants if they offer products that are in line with the original idea of the site.
An example? I constantly look at the referers(from your web log) which tells you how users are finding your site. This analysis has resulted in me finding a product that people coming into my site were looking for, and knowing that, I went scouring the internet for a merchant that offered said product, signed up and imediately started refering sales to them. In the last 10 days it has netted them close to $1000 in sales, at 10% referral. Not much but if it keeps going (and even better if it keeps going up) it will be a cool $300 in my pocket at the end of the month.
10 sites like that would be a super cool $3k/month, enough to get by and buy a 21" lcd monitor to help my poor strained eyes;).
is it usually gadgety type products that people are after.. or things like roombas when they first came out..
I doubt there's any sort of comprehensive listing of merchants "that give you datafeeds". Your best bet to find merchants is to go through affiliate agregators like CJ and linkshare - wether they have datafeeds or not is a matter of asking them. I personally will not work with a company that does not have a datafeed. The work alone in setting up links would be monumental. Even if they don't have a datafeed, sometimes it's a matter of them simply exporting their database into an excel file, and perhaps you can work with them in getting a it started.
Are you getting the datafeeds for free from CJ? They told me there was a $200 fee to use them. Since I didn't want to pay the fee, I have been copying all of the html and placing everything in a database. It's a real pain. I have contacted the vendor for an excel file like you have mentioned, and they said that they couldn't provide it to me. Is this normal? Thanks for any info.
coho75
no idea - it hasn't been my experience with CJ. Bear in mind that I've only worked with 3-4 merchants and their datafeeds, and I may just have lucked out. I don't know why they'd charge for it since it allows you the affiliate to market their products... what kind of industry are you in, if I may ask?
It's that age old SEO marketing question, though. If you've got a finite amount of time, is it better to build one big site or a collection of smaller sites. There are benefits and drawbacks with each direction.
At the end of the day, which do you prefer to maintain. I'm often torn when I think of good new ideas - should I start up a new site? At the same time, though, I enjoy my main website so much and feel like any distraction would be doing it a diservice.
Just as the season can impact your income, so can business cycles. Anyone trying to enter the mobile phone arena today is faced with an uphill struggle against a well established competetive marketplace. Ditto casinos, adult, etc.
The trick here is to look outside of your "box" - we're all more comfortable with what we know, but to quote a good friend...
"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got"
So, the true answer to all these "What should I do next" posts is more trial and error outside of your current field. In other words, take more risks within your own comfort zone, but in a completely unrelated industry.
And as to how many or how much is enough - you decide.
There are more ways to make Money than affiliates, Adsense alone from websites.They can be sold, they can be used for CPM traffic selling,Email Id Collection,they can be used for content selling, just to build your brand, helps for better deals when you negotiate.
For example the very thought you mentioned of building network made me write this post, since you (ur's webmasterworld ID) got a brand name now by talking big, this makes you go there easily.
I was going through my portfilio management classes this what I realised hedge your risk in multiple places always.
Algo or no algo you can make money, just don't depend on one source of traffic,
Multiple sources of traffic:
1.SEO(multiple techniques)
2.PPC
3.Traffic buy(there some decent guys too...)
4.Offline Marketing.
