Gadooney.com

Writing Good Content

You’ve decided what your first site will be about, registered a domain name, and signed up for a Web hosting package. You’re either using WordPress to manage and upload your content or know enough HTML to do it manually. You’re ready to rock and roll and start adding good content to your site.

Which brings us to our first fork in the road. When I say “good”, I don’t necessarily mean that your prose is eloquent, witty, and/or illuminating, perfect and sparkling. None of those adjectives have anything to do with whether your content ranks well in search engines and attracts pre-motivated surfers that will make you money.

You have to always keep in mind that the point of an affiliate site is to provide answers to questions. I cannot stress that enough. Either it’s a surfer typing in a phrase in a search engine, simply looking for more information, or it’s a surfer that already knows what they want to buy, but just aren’t sure whether the product is good or where the best place to buy it is at. Those two situations occur millions of time each day and will provide 99.9% of the money you will ever make as an affiliate.

With that in mind, “good” content for an affiliate site can be defined a bit further:

• Each page of content should address a narrowly-defined topic.
• Each page should have a clear title that includes the keyword(s) that surfers are most likely to search on.
• The targeted keyword is not only in the title, but also sprinkled throughout the text. Don’t overdo it, though. A good rule of thumb is to include the targeted keyword once in every paragraph of text, but I’ll cover this topic in more detail later.
• Shorter pages are best. Four pages of 250 words each are almost always better than one page of 1000 words.
• Avoid long paragraphs whenever possible. Try to stick to paragraphs of 2-3 lines whenever possible as it’s hard to read large blocks of text online.
• Include links to other content on your site whenever possible.

If you stick to those very basic principles, pick a good niche and write a page of content a day, you’ll make money as an affiliate. I guaran-damn-tee it.
Let’s look at an example of both good and bad content, with the above in mind.

Let’s pretend you’ve decided to create a site about some of the Cisco certification classes offered, as it’s something you’ve done yourself and research using the Google Adwords Estimator tool and the Overture Keyword Selector tool has convinced you that there’s lots of searches done in that area and that they pay well for clicks on Adsense ads.

You decide to create a page for “CCNP boot camp”. In this example, you following all of the above suggestions and create a good page of content:

CCNP boot camp: Good

In this example, you ignore all of the above, and end up with a page of content that’s not so good:

CCNP boot camp: Bad

See the difference?  They both contain roughly the same information and are about the same length, but they couldn’t be more different. The first has a clear title, judiciously repeats the targeted keyword throughout, is short and concise, and has short paragraphs. The second has a generic title, barely mentions “CCNP boot camp” specifically, is one block of text, and is in general a train wreck.

If you look at the Google Adsense ads on each page that are automatically served up, Google has a hard time even serving up the appropriate Adsense ads in the bad example, as it defaults to generic ones. It can’t tell that the page is supposed to be about the potentially lucrative “CCNP boot camp” keywords, so it can’t even serve up those potentially profitable ads to be clicked on by surfers.

You’ll notice, too, that I actually worked a bit backwards here, as far as creating the page. I did research to find a juicy keyword phrase (one that pays well for Adsense click and one that is searched on a good bit) and then I created the content. I didn’t start by saying “Gee, I should write some good content today.” I didn’t even start with the slightly more focused approach of saying “Gee, I should write some good content for my CCNA/CCNP site today.” I started by using the tools mentioned above, found a term that should be profitable, and wrote a concise, focused page for that term.

By now you’re probably thinking: “Well, that makes sense, but man, this is sounding like actual work. You told us to write about what we enjoy, and I’m cool with that, but I work enough as it is. Can’t I just write about something I enjoy and not do all that work?”

And the answer, of course, is sure. On all fronts. Yes, it is work, especially if you want to do it well. And yes, you can simply write about what you enjoy, with no other consideration, and slap up some Adsense ads and make a bit of money here and there.

Making money with affiliate sites is very easy to do, if you’re willing to learn how to do it and (more importantly) willing to invest the time to do it well. But it’s always going to be work, no matter how you slice it. The more you work at it, the more you can make. It really is that simple, in the end.

Routine is Good, Albeit Not Very Sexy

One nice habit to get into in the affiliate world is to set aside a block of time each week to check your stats and take stock of the bigger picture in your affiliate efforts. For those of us with a day job, the best time is usually Saturday or Sunday morning, when it’s usually more convenient to drink a cup of coffee (or three) and ruminate on things.

So here’s some rumination, in no particular order, on a variety of topics:

• This project has been more fun than I imagined, as I really do get off on this stuff (as sad as that is) so it’s been very easy to devote time to it. I think the format helps a lot, as far as not feeling pressured to cover every single aspect of affiliate marketing, in order, from A to Z, with all of that done before unveiling the site.
• The fact that I have traffic from the poker blog to, umm, leverage (Jebus I hate that word) helps a lot. Knowing that I already have an audience makes it infinitely easier to spend try trying to put up helpful, juicy content. It’s also going to skew things a bit when I report stats and earnings for the week, which sucks a bit but is unavoidable. I’d hoped that this project would illustrate a lot of the things I was discussing in posts, as far as it taking months for any traffic or income to appear, but being able to immediately generate some traffic and income from links on the poker blog is going to distort that and make it some easier than it really is to make come cash from you first site.
• On the Adsense side of things, for the week I made $0.53 from 4 clicks, with a click-through-rate (CTR) of about 4%. To be fair, the site was only live for about four days, so those figures should be taken with a grain o’ salt. That also includes no search engine traffic as the site isn’t yet indexed in any search engines.
• I made $102.50 at Commission Junction for the week, which included $100 from Falstaff at BoogieTurtle.com signing up for Web hosting at HostGator and $2.50 from another kind soul who registered a domain name at 1&1 . (One thing to note is that your stats typically don’t tell you who signs up where, and I only knew it was Falstaff from a comment he left.) Again, those numbers are a bit misleading as it stemmed directly from traffic from my pre-existing poker blog, but I promised to be completely transparent about all the goings-on of this site, so there you go. Hopefully it’ll also help to see the potential income from advertising for different programs, too.
• For the week, I made $103.03. Ignoring the fact that my hourly earn rate was probably $.04/hour, due to all the time I sunk into getting the site up and running, that’s pretty good. Again, though, not indicative of your average first site, as normally I’d have basically zero traffic, due to the site not being indexed in search engines.

Google Adwords CPC Estimator Tool

If you want to get a rough estimate of what you might make per click for running Adsense ads on certain terms on your site, check out the link below:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Put in the keywords you want to check then go to the pull down menu and select “Cost and add position estimates”. Pull in “100″ in the next box as Max CPC and hit the button.

That’ll generate a full list of estimated CPC amounts for certain positioning in Adwords, which you can use to extrapolate what you’d likely receive for each click for those terms on your pages running Google Adsense. The figures are a little bloated, as they’re an estimate of what it’d cost to be at the top of the ads, so it’s not showing what currently is being paid, just what it’d take you to be on top. Google also takes its cut, so you wouldn’t receive that full amount anyway. And for other reasons I’m not quite sure of, the figures for many keywords seem too high in general.

It’s a decent tool, though, to gauge in general how much you might make running Adsense ads on a site devoted to certain keywords and niches.

Free for All Fridays

This site is way too new for anything like this to attract interest at this time, but I’d like to be more open and accessible with this site and to break down (as much as possible) that invisible barrier between blogger and reader that I usually lovingly hide behind.

So Fridays are wide open. Ask me a question. About affiliate stuff, about anything. Comment and I’ll answer it.

Working on a site of your own? Comment and leave a link and I’ll check it out and ramble about what I think.

Have a great business idea? Let’s hear it.

Looking for great stock tips? Ask someone else, as I’m getting walloped in the markets these days.

Write About What You Enjoy, But Enjoy Narrowly and Intelligently, With a Purpose

This is going to be a long one, so gird thyself.

I’ve already touched on writing about what you know and enjoy for your first site, and indeed, I think that’s some of the best advice out there. But that’s a pretty broad, amorphous thing to advise, so let’s dig down into some practical examples and ways to profitably steer your enthusiasm.

Let’s say we were drinking a beer and the topic of affiliate marketing came up, and you said you wanted to start a site but didn’t know what to write about.

“What are you interested in?” I’d ask.

“Well, you know. Stuff.” you’d say. “I don’t know. Computers?”

“You have to narrow it down more than that,” I’d tell you. “What do you like about computers?  Building them from scratch? Repairing them? Tricking them out with crazy mods?”

“No,” you’d say, “I’m more into networking stuff these days, like running structured wiring throughout my house. Plus I just got my CCNA certification for that promotion at work I’ve been angling for.” 

Bingo. And I’d go on to tell you that you were sitting on potential gold, and that either topic (or both) would make great affiliate sites.

And why would I say that? And why would they make great affiliate sites? Because I’d reverse the roles and pretend to be both a surfer looking for answers as well as an advertiser or merchant. I’d look at both sides, as far as whether the topic would be the subject of lots of focused, well-defined searches, as well as whether there was the opportunity to cash in on the other side, with merchants and advertisers lining up to get a piece of the surfers on your site.

A site devoted to structured wiring would explain exactly what that is, how you do, what equipment and supplies you need, etc. Without doing any research, I’d bet you a box of doughnuts that there are online merchants dedicated to exactly that stuff, selling CAT5e, control boxes, etc. Odds are that some of them have affiliate programs that would pay you for links to products, but even if they don’t you could monetize that site easily by running Google Adsense ads, since surfers that are interested in structured wiring and land on your site are highly motivated to buy the products they need online, since they aren’t always available at the local Home Depot. That means they’re pre-motivated to click on offers in the Google ads, which makes you money each and every time.

The CCNA certification site could detail your experience taking the classes, touch on material that was covered, offer tips, etc. At first glance it seems to hold less promise, as there aren’t any tangible goods that are sold (like with the structured wiring idea) that surfers can click through to and buy. (Although you could also potentially make money by offering links to somewhat related technical programs at online colleges/universities, which pay a decent amount per each surfer that fills out a survey and contact data for further information.) But it’s got something else going for it, which is the fact that many people offering boot camps and certification classes charge a lot for them and are likely willing to spend a lot per click at Google Adwords, which means that your Google Adsense ads could be more profitable per click than would be the case for most topics and products.

Think about that last sentence for a bit. All Adsense ads that are clicked are not created equal. Remember, those ads exist because someone (a merchant, advertiser, or other affiliate) has signed up at Adwords and agreed to pay a certain amount, per click, for specific search terms. The amount they pay directly determines what you get, as the affiliate, for each click of an Adsense ad on your site. If they pay more per click, you get more; if they pay less, you get less.

That means that not all subjects are created equal, if you’re going to run Adsense ads. If it’s an industry that typically makes a lot of money per customer or transaction, it stands to reason that a merchant will pay more per click. They can afford to, as each qualified lead is worth more to them. So industries like credit card providers, pornmongers, mortgage lenders, and lawyers tend to pay a lot per click, since they make beaucoup bucks per customer, which means that you’ll make more running Adsense ads for them.

That said, affiliates know this too, so the competition for clicks in those industries is much higher. You potentially make more per click but have a harder time getting the pages of your site ranked at the top of search engine results, as more affiliates are targeting the same search terms.

Which is a huge detour from where we were, talking about the pros of launching a CCNA certification site. But an important detour, as you always need to consider how potentially lucrative Adsense clicks might be for any given area that you might enter with a new site.

So the structured wiring and CCNA certification sites both look like great ideas. Let’s look at a not-so-great-idea.

Let’s pretend that you’re really into fruit bats. You love bats and know everything in the world there is to know about fruit bats. Since it’s what you know and love, you decide to launch an affiliate site for fruit bats.

Well, okay. If it was a labor of love, I’d say knock yourself out, but an affiliate site is designed to make you money. And it’s pretty impossible to find a way to make money on a site about fruit bats.

If bats were common pets, then it’d be viable. You’d create much content about bats, attract surfers interested in bats (likely many who own a pet bat), and then wrap that content around either affiliate product ads for things like bat cages, bat toys, etc., or around Adsense ads. But bats aren’t common pets. And there’s not even a slant equivalent, as bats aren’t a close equivalent to birds. If it was a site on squirrels, you might be able to push people towards a somewhat similar animal like a ferret or rat (which you could monetize), but bats are pretty unique.

You could run Adsense ads but again, what sort of ad would appeal to someone searching for information on fruit bats? What are they looking for, that’s a marketable product or service, that might catch their eye if they see an offer in the Adsense ads? Nothing, really. Run “fruit bats” through Google and look on the right. There’s just one Adsense ad there, a totally generic one for Ask.com, which means that there’s no demand for search traffic on “fruit bats”.

Remember, you make money with Adsense only when a surfer clicks on an ad. Surfers only do that when the ad is appealing, which usually only happens when your site contains content that is similarly appealing to them. Visitors on a fruit bat site aren’t looking for quotes on a new car. Visitors on a car quote site aren’t looking for information on fruit bats. Traffic is useless to you unless it’s focused and pre-motivated and there’s an existing market for their clicks.

So the fruit bat site is pretty much a no-go, from an affiliate perspective. You could build it and get some traffic here and there but there’s little you can do with that traffic.

Be Like the Shark that Doesn’t Fear Failure, Not the Risk-Averse Tree Sloth

One tendency when first starting out in the affiliate world is to focus all of your efforts on your first site. It’s your brainchild, your baby. It’s a very natural tendency and one that I recommend embracing, as narrow focus is a very good thing when first starting out.

In true annoying fashion, though, I’m going to muddy the waters by immediately contradicting that statement. Ha. Deal with it.

Love your first site, embrace it, cuddle it to your bosom and call it George, but also keep in mind that the odds are great that if you stick with the affiliate marketing business, it probably won’t even exist five years down the road. Things change pretty rapidly in the affiliate world and sometimes sites and projects don’t pan out, and it’s cheaper to simply pull the plug instead of paying to renew the domain.

It’s less true these days with PPC programs abounding, as you can monetize nearly any page, but the underlying principle is mostly intact. Affiliates typically churn through sites and projects like crazy. They’re always circling, shark-like, trying this, then trying that, but always moving and churning out pages.

The absolute first affiliate sites I created five years ago were for various porn sites, as I was lured by the crazy $100-$150 payouts for every customer that signed up for even a $2.99 trial membership. I spent much time on a few of these sites, trying to create the most awesomest porn affiliate site the world has ever seen. All those sites are long dead and gone as I wasn’t able to make much headway in that ultra-competitive space.

Over the next few years I tried all sorts of things, building sites for prescription pet medications, online car quotes, survivalist gear, knives, bonsai trees, legal herbs, body jewelry, you name it. These were increasingly successful, largely because I started treating them as less-than-precious and disposable, focusing on getting tons of content out there and casting a very wide net. Visually these sites looked like a hunk of junk and the content was fairly skimpy, geared towards getting search engine traffic and getting them to click through affiliate links, with no real attempt to build a sticky site or to develop a core audience. i’d build ‘em, move on, and forget them, never returning to update the site or content. While a few are still alive, the shelf life of sites like those is usually 6-12 months, at which point they fall out of search results and become pretty useless.

The last few years I’ve focused on online gambling affiliate sites, admittedly a bit too much in light of the recent legislation that led to me selling off nearly all of those sites and/or simply shuttering them. Had a very nice run there while it lasted, though, so it’s hard to completely second-guess going down that particular path.

The point of that personal detour is that if you’d told me back in the beginning that I would have built all those sites leading up to the present, I’d have laughed. I was pretty convinced that I knew exactly how my first affiliate site was going to make me lots of money. I don’t really regret that, as I learned a ton throwing myself into working on that site, but the path for me ended up ultimately being a long and winding road, with many pit stops that I never would have imagined.

So yeah. Give your first site your heart and soul but remember to keep a suitcase packed underneath the bed.

A Page a Day

Many successful affiliates have stated this in different ways, but one recipe for affiliate success is really quite simple:

Create at least one new page of content, each and every day, and you’ll be a rich monkey.

There’s much wisdom in that, despite the fact that it seems far too simple and easy. It does presuppose a few things (that you’ve got the assorted chops necessary to write good content and structure it for maximum traction in search engines, as well as the necessary knowledge to monetize the traffic you get), since you can’t just launch crappy, unfocused content into space and expect to make money.

The statement does get at some pretty important principles, though, if you unpack it a bit.

• Successful affiliates aren’t rocket scientists. All you have to do is be able to write reasonably well and to have the gumption (or greed) to plug away it on a daily basis. That’s it.
• Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you necessarily have to create one uber site and work solely on that site, day in and day out. There’s nothing in the above statement that says you must only focus on one site. As long as you’re creating a page of content a day, you’re on track. You could have one site, ten sites, or fifty sites. Don’t be afraid to spread your efforts out, as diversity is almost always a good thing and it has the nice extra bonus of breaking up the monotony of the grind of creating content.
• Content trumps everything else in the affiliate world. Don’t sit around saying boo-hoo, I can never compete with other affiliates who have been doing this for years and have tons of traffic. Sure, in some niches you will never, ever catch up, if you tried to launch a new affiilate site to compete with established affiliates. So what. There are 192,293,381 other profitable niches just waiting for you to cash in on them. Get to work.

Waiting Really is the Hardest Part

One of the most difficult things about getting started with affiliate marketing is that the sledding is very slow and rough at first. If you’re completely starting from scratch (and not simply adding links to an existing site you have with traffic), you’ll very likely go months without any visible fruits from your labors. And even when the first fruits do appear, they are usually very, very tiny and far from ripe.

There are several reasons for that, but the most prominent is that it simply takes time for your site to be fully indexed in search engines, especially with Google. It’s frustrating, but it’s just the way things go. Most search engines are moving towards using a sandbox filter, first pioneered by Google, that takes into account how old your site is when indexing and ranking your pages. All that means is that there is usually a waiting period where you new site is treated differently and not fully indexed, even if it would normally rank highly for certain terms. When your site has been around for awhile, you get the green light and are indexed fully. In some ways this sucks, but in others it’s a good thing, as it’s purpose is to protect you in the long run from people spamming content on sites, automatically generating millions of pages overnight on new, throwaway domains and endlessly repeating the process.

This is one reason I recommend immediately jumping in and getting the ball rolling, even if your site isn’t polished and completely done. Get the main pages up, even if you know you will tweak the content, design, and layout later. It’s very natural to want your first baby to be perfect and beautiful when you reveal it to the outside world, but the reality is that no one is going to be looking at the beginning anyway, so it really doesn’t matter what it looks like.

If you stretch a bit, you can turn the waiting game to your advantage. Instead of getting impatient and expecting immediate results, try to see it as a savings or IRA account. Each page you create has the potential to earn you money for years. While you may not see any returns from that work in the short term, it will eventually kick in, and it will continue to work for you, long after you’ve created it.

Pay-Per-Click Affiliate Programs

Pay-per-click (PPC) programs pay affiliates each time a link is clicked on their site. Google Adsense is the most popular PPC program, and in many ways it revolutionized the affiliate marketing arena, as it opened ip a whole new way of making money.

The way PPC programs work is that merchants or advertisers (basically people selling things or trying to draw traffic to their website) sign up, and agree to spend a certain amount of money for each click that is generated by an affiliate. In the Google world, merchants and advertisers sign up at Google Adwords and create a campaign in which they make their ad and set their budget, as far as how much they’re willing to pay per click for certain keywords.

So that’s where the money comes from that pays you, the affiliate, when you display Google text ads on your site and someone clicks on them. Google is the middleman man and pockets some cash each and every time, as they don’t pay you the full amount the merchant or advertiser is paying.

We’re all pretty used to the PPC model these days but the reason it was such a game-changing event when it rolled out is that suddenly affiliates could make money on topics that they could never monetize before. Before PPC, the only way to make money as an affiliate was to refer surfers on your site to a retailer via a link, where they had to buy something, at which point you’d get a piecce of it as commission. But that involves a sale, and it’s notoriously hard to convert surfers to buyers, so it was harder to make money, and you usually only started making real money months down the line when your affiliate site had lots of traffic.

Not so with PPC, as you can immediately start generating income from something as simple as a click on a link, with no purchase required. It also opens up all sorts of areas for affiliate sites, as you simply have to write about a topic that people search on (and that advertisers and merchants bid on, on the Adwords side of things) in order to potentially make money. Suddenly sites about pet rats or the Civil War could be profitable, even if there are no merchants out there with affiliate programs to hawk products for. Create the site, add some Adsense links, and presto, you can make some money from people clicking on the Google ads on your pages.

One thing to be aware of, though, is the potential trade-off of PPC versus traditional affiliate programs. If your site is about home theater systems, you have to be careful that you don’t go with PPC and unintentionally cost yourself tons of money. With a traditional program, you get paid a set commission based on what people you refer buy. For a lot of retailers, it’s typically something like 2-6% commission. Some programs pay you that for the life of the customer, some don’t, the details vary from program to program. What you need to be aware of, though, is that if your affiliate site is geared towards relatively high-ticket items, you probably want to avoid PPC, even though it’ll give you a more immediate return, as far as making money. While it’d be great to make $20/month from Google Adsense clicks, it doesn’t take too many surfers going on to spend lots of money with the retailer to cost you money, as you might otherwise be receiving 5% commission on their purchases for life.

Your monthly earnings are steadier in PPC programs and much more dependable (as they’re really just a function of your overall traffic), but they also don’t have the potential upside that traditional programs do, if you land a few whales that go on to spend tons of money.

Managing Your Website

Once you’ve registered a domain name and have a Web hosting package set up, the obvious question is, umm, what do you do now? Good question.

As I’ve mentioned before, I highly, highly recommend that you use WordPress when starting out. It’s free, simple to install, and provides you with a browser-based way of publishing content to your site. If your Web host provides WordPress installations for you, you may have it already loaded and ready to go. If not, the Wordpress site provides the free download and all sorts of installation instructions to get you up and running.
If you don’t use WordPress or some similar content management system, then you’ll be managing and uploading content to your site the old-fashioned way, creating HTML pages and then uploading them to your site via FTP. Like many old-fashioned ways of doing things, this works extremely well and there’s nothing at all wrong with managing your site this way. The reason I shy away from it is that it means you have to either have a good working knowledge of HTML or are willing to spend the time learning it (which is beyond the scope of what I’m going to cover here).

Many die-hard coders would claim that I’m doing you a disservice by pushing you towards WordPress and enabling you to avoid having to learn HTML. And they’re exactly right. In a perfect world where time is unlimited, we’d not only learn to code HTML by hand in Notepad but also know how to churn butter in case the local grocery store burned down. Unfortunately, in the real world, sometimes we have to cut corners. While it’s optimal to be a HTML guru, you can run a highly successful affiliate website these days with little to no HTML knowledge.

If you’re going for the quick and easy route I’m recommending, all you really need to manage your first website is WordPress and a FTP program to edit permissions on certain files in WordPress, as well as to possibly install WordPress itself to your server. I’m a big fan of FileZilla, which is a free open-source FTP application that is really easy to use. If you already have a FTP client installed, cool, use that one (they’re all pretty similar for what we need them to do), but if you don’t have one at all, I’d go with FileZilla.

And that’s really all you need to get up and running, as far as programs or applications on your end of things to manage your website.