Forum Moderators: skibum
I started my affiliate sites August 2004, got a few hundreds dollars though, but it's not constant income, not something that i can rely on for my livings. I am really curious how long you guys waited to get a constant income stream from doing internet marketing? i see posts claiming that this can be done sicne day one or on the first month. How can this be done? advise?
Your question is similar to "how long does it take for you to learn how to play guitar/language proficiently?" to which the standard answer will be "it depends" - on your commitment(time/effort wise), your starting point, and web savvyness and skills. But, if anyone had to throw a number, I'd say at least 3 months to 6 months of a lot of reading and a lot of doing.
One of the things I recommend is to focus primarily on things that will generate organic traffic. Build a site that is a truly useful, unique authority in it's area. The more useful and unique a site is, the more free "organic" traffic you'll get from repeat visitors, free publicity, free unsolicited links, natural search, etc. and the faster traffic will grow. Many don't see the value in this, but it really is essential in the long term. (It can mean the difference between struggling to get 500 visitors per day versus trying to figure out how to handle 100,000 visitors per day--A much better problem to have.) You can see short term results with other methods like PPC and SEO (and I think it's good to use those methods), but this is the best way for consistent, long-term results.
The secondary focus should be on finding ways to monetize the site. If the site is focused around a specific product or group of products, that becomes easy. If the site is more general in nature, it's a little more work. I suggest these steps in that case:
1) Identify your audience. Who is coming to your site? Is it single mothers? Is it people with pets? Is it new parents? Is it webmasters? Is it teens? This is usually the easiest step. For instance, if your site is a place for people to post photos of their pets, your audience is people who have pets.
2) Identify what your audience would be interested in. This is the hardest step for most people. It's not necessarily what they came to your site for. For example, with an audience of pet owners, they might be interested in pet food, pet supplies, books about pets, t-shirts with pictures of their pets, etc.
3) Find ways to make money while providing visitors the things you identified in step 2. When they sign up to post photos of their pets, find out what types of pets they have and let them assign names and pet types of each photo gallery. Then, when displaying the photos, include more targeted offers (dog food, dog supplies, and dog books on dog pages, etc.). Find several affiliate programs that offer dog food and compare the benefits of each (selection, price, shipping, coupons, etc.). List current coupons for any dog food stores that have coupons. Categorize the dog supplies and offer a showcase page for each category of dog toys. Write reviews for popular dog books (Chicken Soup for the Dog Owner's Soul, for instance) and provide affiliate links. The key is to provide extremely relevant, helpful resources that complement your site.
4) Integrate this new content with your existing content. Build small blurbs that will be interspersed with your current content. For instance, for the review of a dog book, include the cover and the first couple sentences of your review with a link to the rest. Don't put all of this in an "Advertisements" column, otherwise it'll get ignored. Have it all mixed together.
MovingOnUp,
quote:"The key is to provide extremely relevant, helpful resources that complement your site."
-- i think this sum up to be the best advise for both G Adsense and affiliates. however, i wonder how many webmasters will still stick to this quotes as i found most SE out there are ranking all those spammy sites incredibly high.
rfung,
hey bud, thanks, for the advise as well as all the great threads in the WW. you are one of my favourite posters! i have some questions however ...you said in other thread, you manage to pull in $10/day through adsense in your new developed site. this is what amazed me! do you get lots of clicks or the CPC is very high?
hitting a sales might be easy -- a 3 to 6 months hard work might seal it. but to achieve my objective, to generate a steady income flow from internet, i believe need much more than that.
"The key is to provide extremely relevant, helpful resources that complement your site."I think this sum up to be the best advise for both G Adsense and affiliates. however, i wonder how many webmasters will still stick to this quotes as i found most SE out there are ranking all those spammy sites incredibly high.
The spammy sites might get some good positions for some keywords for a while, but in the long term it's the most useful, unique sites that will win out.
1) Search engines are working hard to eliminate the spammy sites from the results. Some may have some high positions for some keywords today, but those positions are precarious at best.
2) Useful, unique sites will get a lot of unsolicited links on sites, in blogs, and in forums. These links will help them get better natural search results over time.
3) Useful, unique sites will get a lot of traffic even without natural or paid search. This will be from return visitors, word of mouth, press mentions, forum and blog mentions, unsolicited links, etc. This traffic is far more reliable than natural search and far more affordable than PPC.
Are you interested in a quick buck from spammy pages, or would you rather build a site with long term potential by providing unique, useful solutions?
but anyway, i am still on the 'clean' track..setting up an informative sites for some electronics appliances. started last year August, still couldnt rank well in the SE, but manage make some sales as i am actively hanging around related forums and articles submission solving people's problems.
currently i'm on the planning stage to start up some new project in order to split my eggs to different baskets. after reading many many rfung's post regarding adsense, i am thinking of starting one as well. any sharings on researching profitable topics for adsense (ie. low SE competition + high advertiser bids)?
here some sharings of my plannings/approach:
1) check for overture max bid for the adsense revenue.
2) check google serp for the competition
3) repeat steps 1&2 until i am satisfy on certain topic.
any problems or further suggestions on that?
Right now it's at $40/day through adsense. it's a fairly clean site - nothing black hat or seo. If I had to take a guess, i'd say that the niche isn't very optimized or maybe there aren't many knowledgeable seo'd sites in that industry out there.
It's all organic traffic though.
Cheers and good luck!
