Blogging Along

Would it be an ideal situation if you could work away in a warm climate laid on a sun lounger next to the pool without a care in the world?

Well hell yeah !! of course it would be.

It’s all down to game plans in business and what type of business you are in. Affiliation is a bit of a roller coaster for many if you have all your eggs in one basket (sector or website) but can bring wealth and fortune for many if done right. I am talking 10s if not 100s of thousands a month too with some people.

So the ideal setup for working in the sun, next to the pool drinking beer. You grow a portfolio of sites in many sectors, such as private health, insurance, retail items shoes, presents, hotels, breaks and mobiles or electronics. Optimise these websites in a niche for each, so for insurance pick “Life Insurance” maybe. Build in a content management system called WordPress and besides all the standard tweaking to make the site SEO friendly post to the site every day looking at daily news feeds for article ideas.

A good tip for getting good traffic is to mention some of the main companies in the industries. Healthcare mention BUPA or AXA, Mobiles mention all the networks like Vodafone, Orange and Three.

This won’t be an over night process and will nicely age like a good wine.

A lot of affiliates who push services and products that make a small fortune use Adwords to drive traffic towards their websites in hope of an increase in sales. This is a fine art and I almost class it as gambling as it can make or break a lot of profit.

I had a website in the private Health sector that ranked and still does for really good phrases and made a nice amount each month from Adsense. I sold the domain to a friend who started using it for affiliation and instead of Adsense used a form for lead generation and made £25 per lead. This turned my effort of Adsense into a nice win fall by making 10 fold what I was from natural search results. He is also running an Adwords campaign that spiraled the amount to 100 fold again :-/ and as you can understand, a little bit sickening for me.

If he wanted and didn’t have commitments of a mortgage, a wife who’s a school teacher, and others he could and 100% would be working abroad in a warm climate, laid on a sun lounger, next to the pool without a care in the world!

If you do need any help with going down this road please do contact me.

Over the years I have found that certain products or services shine more with the seasons from the revenue generated from the sites I produce. Obviuosly Christmas Present related site do well from October and increase right up until 23rd December. BBQ sites do well in summer and snow shoes would do well in winter.

Taking this onboard I thought how much of a boost having a mini site would be if in general your business sinks during the colder months for example if you are a fencing suppier in Glasgow if your sales were 20% of what they are in summer what would effect would it have if it just dropped by 50% to 50%?

Having mini sites for areas of your business that taken individually are quite niche and letting me create micro sites for them maybe a case of sink or swim during hard times. You can pay on a monthly lease basis for 12 months at a time, for example if you have a fencing business in Wakefield and you lease a site from us in summer you”ll get more sales due to the site and a buffer in place for the winter months.

This to put figures to the idea and to make it easier – you have a normal (no niche mini sites) year in summer and take in £100’000 having a mini lease site for say a fencing business in Leicester may get on average 2 calls extra a day from the site. This would maybe from 1500 visitors to your site a month but you maybe would convert out the 60 calls a month just 10 of them. Taking a job with a profit of £250 on average, that would take in at least £12’500 over the summer months.

That’s just converting 4% of all visitors to your leased niche website!

Completed a few short 45 second long promo videos for the Freedom centre. These just highlighted future events and turned out really nice. Gave me a boost on pushing this type of video to other businesses and the good thing is they can use them on their web site and are featured on Humber.TV too.

Looking to cut back on my domains I’m letting a lot drop that in my eyes I could do without renewing as 10 would cost £70 for 2 years! On the flip side all my Hull domains are now listed on HullDomians.co.uk and give the ability for visitors to show an interest and place an offer in through a form system. To start my campaign off to either rent them out or sell them I’ve placed an Ad in the Hull Daily Mail for a week starting 19th February.

Just bought 2 domains YorkshireSEO.uk and YorkshireDesign.co.uk for £60 which I thought was a bargain and should be able to get them ranking and sold on to a local business. (if I don’t use them myself)

Looking through my SAGE accounts I noticed I’d dropped a bombshell and missed nearly everyones hosting renewals from last year. #fail But should be a nice boost for a few bills I have come up or have now.

I took a punge and turned off my shop plugin for JokeShop.org.uk and made posts as normal posts but mirrored the path so not to upset Google etc. Instead of actually selling products myself I’m giving” Paid on results” affiliate links from Silly Jokes. Traffic from my site is directed to them I make a sale and I get a cut of it but has proven shite TBH.

I may turn the shop back on if by the end of this month I don’t make one sale.

I’m quite a laid back “do anything for anyone” kind of guy, but over the past few months I’m seeing more and more reason to look after No1 more. Dog eat dog world it’s turning into I just need to look at every situation a little more before jumping in to the rescue or offering.

I found my CV on an old memory stick and decided to apply for a few jobs in SEO, Marketing etc just to see what response I get as theirs no harm in trying to see what bites I get from it. I actually wouldn’t mind going into a decent company to work on SEO and online marketing for companies. I would do a bad job too! ;o)

I decided to pull the internet connection from Beverley as I was only using it twice a week for 1 or 2 hours and was costing £40 + a month. So just a waste really.

Final thought for me about my Hull Domains, I may need to educate business about mini sites and “do what you say on the tin” domains buy hopefully enough will get it and opt for the rent option to try and test.

Looking at ways to always make extra pennies from mini sites I was surprised to see £4-5 from a broadband site I’d set up a few years back. Looking into this a little more broadband clicks pay quite well from £1 to £5+ which does make it worth while.

Broadband in general and even mobile broadband isn’t really a niche no more and so >Geo<broadband.co.uk sites do well as they haven’t been tapped into that much as your Talk Talk’s BT’s and Virgins cover the whole UK.

proving that it does pay well and works I bought 3 domains of cities over 100’000 in population and setup 3 mini sites with a simple html template.

• LutonBroadband.co.uk
• BradfordBroadband.co.uk
• BrightonBroadband.co.uk

Once they show up in Search Engines and have a bit of age I’ll add the to a WordPress install and make regular posts to them about the pit falls and tips of broadband etc.  I’ve lost my login for Affiliate window and so need to send an email so that I can also add affiliate links which do pay more money but they have to sign up to get the commissions

Luton, Bradford and Brighton been fairly large towns should prove a popular search group with people online and if proven a winner easily cloned  ( not the content the idea ;o) )

Need to rant so here’s 1

-start rant-

Why do people think just because the phone isn’t agaist their ear its ok to DRIVE and use a mobile by having it on speaker phone and holding it infront of them AGGGHhhhhh.

-end of rant-

I have a growing network (as mentioned before) of Hull domains mainly plus a few other cities and have a solid £9 – £10 a day coming in from a select few with affiliation advertising.

In fact I must have 350+ of Hull domains or similar like ManchesterPrint co uk and know for a fact 90% are NOT live or haven’t been optimised at all for SEO or revenue.

So I do think if all 350 rose to a level where each was getting even a few uniques a day it would add up to over £100 a day. I have noticed with the sites that do earn, very rarely go over just 10 uniques a day to get a click or have a CTR (click through rate) is mainly 10% or more.

But as many of you know 350 + mini sites all take time to build, add content, and maintain. If all sites together earn’t £100 a day, it would be worth the effort/cost to action that .

On a flip side, I think if all the Geo domains (350+) was indexed in search engines and had a fair number of uniques a day I could demand a starting sale price of £500  for the sale of each to local businesses in the relevant area.

You all can add that up to £175k which is a very nice sum (if all were sold) and would only go through with the sales if every domain was sold and not just cherry picked.

So I just need to get people on them and set some time aside to blast them all live!

I started out in buying domains at the beginning of 2007 with 123ABC co.uk from a drop, where someone had let it lapse and didn’t renew it.

Over the 2 years of buying domains, developing some and selling them on has had me thinking at stages

AM I MAD? Will it ever pay off?

In the early days when I was buying rubbish domains and not really doing much with them, yes, I did think OMG I’m addicted and am never going to get a return.

I turned to trying SEOing a few of them, which I had great results for Google rankings and Page Rank. So in  nearly 3 years I’ve chomped my way through at least a 1000+ domains. On the flip side have made many £xxxx’s too, and increasing more so now I sort of understand from Affiliation and selling domains.

To get a domain to earn,

1. It’s reg fee back
2. It’s hosting cost back

Is a good feeling, knowing what ever money comes in after that, is pure profit or at least in exchange for any extra time you spend on it on development. I now have 3 accounts with (cheap) Blue Host which allows me to have upto 300 domains, with a WordPress install on them.

Limitations are in place with them like I said your limited to a huge 100 Mysql Db’s but also your file count, as I found out the other day with an email from them…..

your file count is ideally 50’000 but MUST be below 200’000!

100 WordPress Installs = 80’000+ files with no plugin’s, no theme’s and no content/pages and so over the 50’000 straight away! But hey ho fair enough as I cut back what I can to keep below the 200’000.

Back on track with my plans….

Latest plans are all based around local mini sites like HullPrint.co.uk, I started in Hull as it’s my local city and am now moving to the other larger cities by population.

• Birmingham
• Leeds
• Glasgow
• Sheffield
• Bradford
• Liverpool
• Manchester
• Bristol
• Wakefield
• Cardiff
• Leicester
• Belfast
• Brighton

Out of the 200 Geo domains I have, if 50% of them perform ok and bring in at least £5 per day through Adsense and Affiliation

I’ll be a happy man!

I’ll keep you posted, but just a snap shot of todays earnings from just 4 of the GEO sites that are performing ok.

• Site 1 = £6.43
• Site 2 = £1.11
• Site 3 = £0.46
• Site 4 = £0.34

Just a quick post on Amazon’s conversion.

Put links, product feeds, images in a mini site or affiliate store and people just flock to buy.

Latest buys from my sites in the past 2 days include:

• Toshiba SD290EKB DVD Player
• Trust Slimline Design Tablet TB-5300
• Horrible Science Shocking Rocket
• Horrible Science Spooky Stars
• Horrible Science Violent Volcano
• Match Attax 2009/10 Tins
• Nerf Mega Dart Tag Refill
• Nerf Nstrike Switch Shot EX-3 Yellow
• Waddingtons “Number 1” Playing Cards
• Yada Yada Yada Voice Recorder

Christmas is always a good time for making money from affiliation and if you haven’t given it a go, you should. Pick a niche market, check on Amazon their are plenty of them on offer and start posting info and links for them.

Maybe try Sleeping bags or tents to start with as a niche area, register a relevant domain name  like CampingSleepingBag.co.uk (which is available at posting) post articles with links and photo’s from Amazon on a daily basis if possible.

2 months later traffic should be flowing along with revenue!